Thanks for the helpful suggestion. The problem I was having was that the GPIO pins did not show up as assignable in the .qsf file I had. I made some progress tonight by way of the system builder utility that came on the CD. In the utility I found a way to enable to GPIO header and generate a .qsf file. In the project I can now see those pins in the assignment editor, however for some reason quartus is still now letting me assign those pins to input and output. When I build the simple test project I had attached earlier, even with the input and output named as the GPIO[0] and GPIO[1] pins it still fails to assign and the result is broken programming on the DE2 that doesn't work. Any idea what I'm missing here? Why is the program still not allowing the assignment? Is there something else I have to configure?