[madbadgalaxyman (Robert)]

Greg, I think I can answer your question as to whether M31 is actually a spiral galaxy. You are quite right to point out that most of the prominent "arm" features are actually arrayed in a giant ring, so this is more of a ring galaxy than a spiral galaxy!

It was recognized, long ago, when people made maps of the distribution of OB stars and HII regions over the face of this galaxy, and when they then deprojected M31 to a face-on orientation, that all of their "joining the dots" to make so-called "spiral arms" did not produce any plausible overall spiral structure for this galaxy.....the only valid interpretation was (and still is) that the major structure of current star formation (e.g. Molecular clouds, OB stars, HII regions, etc) in the Andromeda Galaxy is actually a ring!!

There are indeed a few minor spiral arms, but the ring structure dominates.

The ring structure may be connected with passages of close satellites such as M32 and NGC 205. Furthermore, the disk structure of M31, far from looking planar (as we would expect from the textbooks) looks to depart from planarity in several places. M31 has had a very complex history, for instance it has disturbed greatly the outer gaseous parts of M33.

best regards, robert

P.S.
I have extensive multi-wavelength imaging data showing the circular distribution of many different star formation tracers in M31, if anybody wants to investigate this further.