I uninstalled 7.1 and installed the 7.2 tools. I am able to open the projects. The problem now is that I cannot compile any of the SW examples for the CIII starter board.
For example trying the NiosII_small project with the 'hello world small' app, I get symbol '_exit' undefined in generated.x for the syslib. The file syslib does not include any reference to this symbol, and the line# flagged is beyond the end of the file anyway. It seems like there is a path missing or some other incompatibility between.
Hmmm... I did not rebuild and regen the project before I compiled under the IDE. Maybe thats it.