Question about Working With Particles

This is my first post, so please be gentle :)

I have finally started to get deeper into working with Blender 2.45, and 
today I decided to check out particles. I created an isosphere object 
and just gave it the default values, with the exception of giving it a 
-1.0 velocity in Z (I wish I had the screenshot to show you; I'll upload 
it later.)

I then made a ground plane that the particles would bounce off of when 
they hit it, and I also made it so that it could detect a softbody (I 
couldn't find any way to make it a "hard" body object--no, seriously!). 
What ended up happening was that the particles actually came out of the 
sphere's left side. It actually looked like what you'd get if you turned 
a spinning sprinkler on its side.

Now, this is a cool effect, but not what I was looking for. What I want 
to do is have the particles fall towards the floor and bounce off of the 
ground plane. What I want to do eventually is have it be like a rocket 
thruster that generates huge clouds of smoke before it finally shoots 
into the air.