Ted,
This answer goes miles and miles for me. It's hard to see what these pieces do until you spend an hour or two with them. But this at least gives me an approach to get to the point that I can *start* my class project. If I can just get one or two simple things to feed from Eclipse to the NIOS mp core (I think I said that right) I can get this project done in time for sure.
I tried one of those courses to kinda learn the Quartus interfaces. I wish they weren't lecture format. I could read the entire text of the course in 40 minutes, but the lecture I selected was like 8 hours long and the information was parceled out rather slowly. I suppose if I can't immediately figure out what I'm doing I'll just have to commit the time to it. It's not the worst thing because I at least know I'm probably on the right track now.
Thanks again.