I have the altera DE1 cyclone II fpga board running windows 7 (64) home version.
Today (not yesterday) I cannot get the jtag programmer (usb 0) to configure from J-TAG
to Active Serial mode to burn the config prom.(Changing the uart baud rate today) Any one know why this glitch happened. Back on Boxing Day.

Are you saying that the Quartus programmer dialog wouldn't let you change the Mode drop-down box from JTAG to Active Serial? Or that the configuration failed when Active Serial was selected?

At the risk of asking the obvious, did you set the "prog/run" switch to "prog"? (This has tripped me up before!)

(Am I right in thinking that Quartus 9.0 is the version that came with the DE1? If you continue to have trouble it might be worth trying a newer version - the newest version that still supports Cyclone II is 13.0.1)

Merry Christmas!

That is the bug. I was doing some last minute programing, and saved the most current version to the config eprom, last night but the new logic was not tested yet.

Found the bug ... too smart of software. Config setup of the device got reset to "passive serial."
Has to be set to "active serial". Now to find why my serial port can not find com3.