Yes! Absolutely! (excitement at someone helping, not anger). Thank you!
I tried another approach siting a few other posts that said if you use DSPI0 (instead of DSPI1) it should work, but that is not true. It took me a while to locate the right pins (anyone have a pin-layout diagram nearly half as good as the Due?) but once I did I received the same error.
It's really quite simple to reproduce. Just use DSPI and Serial.read(). I figured I might try switching to regular SPI, but I don't know if that would actually solve anything. Just something to try.
I was also pretty close to giving up and try using my Due. They can't both be messed up.
Oh, and I tried again to log in to Chipkit's forum with no success. My email stating the issue to Digilent has gone unanswered for over a week now.
Thanks again for trying to help.