FPGA newbie

hi, i just today received my Cyclone III Starter Kit. I have never done anything with FPGAs before today, but i have a firm understanding of digital electronics/microcontrollers/processors.

The problem is the control panel, it doesnt connect to the board, it just says "Fail to connect your development board"(i assume thats what it means). Quartus Web Edition works just fine, i am able to program the SRAM with FPGA configurations.

The really odd thing is that the same thing happened on another computer i tried the control panel on(i never installed quartus on it).

Also i have a few questions:

How is the fpga, the board's microcontroller and the sram/dram/flash linked together?

is it a serial interface of some kind, if so, what are the pins on the fpga involved?

How does the microcontroller tell the fpga what location(and what device) to get its configuration from?

Why is the non web edition quartus better than the web edition?

Looking at the pins in the pin planner, i see loads of stuff somehow related to each pin, like V9(osc input) is dedicated clock,clk14 and diffclk_6n(suggesting LVDS as there is a pin right above it with a diffclk_6p)

This doesnt add up, how can the pin be more than one thing at a time?

or....does this indicate its common usage, not its function?

any help would be much appreciated.

Lee.