Hi Kevin,

> It showed the curve "melted" away from its control points
> gradually as order was increased by 1, but i'm not sure, it
> could have been weighting of control points.

Was it maybe one of these ones talking about the Conic command?

http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2746.14
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2746.4


Otherwise if you want some general background and diagrams about how NURBS works, maybe one of these reference articles:

http://www.mactech.com/articles/develop/issue_25/schneider.html
http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~matt/courses/cs563/talks/nurbs.html


Also a bit of description about curve degree here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=290.8


- Michael