Urgent: cant program Cyclone III design

thank you for the quick replies. i really appreciate it. As you mentioned, putting a scope on the signals was my first idea as well, so the first thing i did was take the board back to the university, ad while i was there I thought I'd test it on some of the other USB blaster cables. The first one i tried worked fine, but only for JTAG. interestingly enough though, the second did not... so i'm led to believe its not the programmer's fault, but probably something minor in the circuitry. unfortunately I never got to the scope, but rather replaced my able with the working one. Next I'm going to try the PCB changes (thanks by the way) and see what comes of that.