It's really a pain to manage the parent pom for a multi-modules project in eclipse. It would be nice to can solve this issue for instance : http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/MNGECLIPSE-635
Many problem comes from the fact that eclipse do not manage nested project hierarchies. It seems that eclipse 4 will do it (cf. http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/05/e4-summit). But in the meantime we have to found some solution to can manage it and for the moment it's not really the case. Rémy