Hi Larry. This was a big issue for us, that we had to work out before going live. I don't know if your situation is exactly like ours, though.
For us, the seminar event is what users search for, (which date/location they preferred), not the course, and we knew it would be very difficult to explain there are actually two separate enrollments happening.
So, we use seminar-direct enrollment for all seminar (workshop) enrollments, so the seminar events are what users see when browsing the catalog. When they sign up for a seminar, they are automatically enrolled into the course.
If, in your scenario, you have valid situations where users are enrolled in the course without going to an event, then I'm not sure this will solve your problems. Our situation was further comlicated by the fact that end-users didn't sign up for events for themselves, but managers allocated space for them. This led to a need for some customizations, but hopefully you won't need that!