Still no luck.
I did run a sketch and determined that the RTC seems to be OK on the board, which works over i2c.
I think I should get ANYTHING to run with SPI first to make sure that it's working, and that I understand it better.
What is the easiest way to test the SPI?
Should I hook it up to a 9-pin serial port to the SPI pins and connect it up to my PC?
Is it possible to do that easily or is there difficulties with the communication rates?
The digipot seems the best simple example I've seen.