Hi Jamie,
There are some things that can be done completely within the view. You mentioned clearing fields. Another might be initial validation of a field.
There are other interactions that might not need to go via the controller either - the diagram in the Sun
Model-View-Controller Blueprint tells you that the View can send a State query to the Model. It is only user gestures that should go via the controller. You could argue that finding out the names of the columns could fall under the state query category, so you could get that directly from the model. But changing the data the model is holding (by doing a query) falls under the user gestures category.
As for the user help - I guess that depends on how you implemented it. Personally I had user help in several seperate help files. These had their own model which retrieved them (to hide the fact that they were in physical files). Since I had several help files, requesting different bits of help could result in the data being modeled by the help model changing. Therefore help requests were sent via the controllers. (I also had a separate view for the online help, in it's own JFrame, but that is a separate story).
Does this clarify it? Or have I just confused you further?
Regards, Andrew