Thanks for the great tutorial!

And please do select one of my fine art pieces you like, and I will gladly send it your way. Thanks again.

I decided to change the category structure so that my recent-works category was now the top category over all my art work. I put all other art categories under it. Now I no longer have to build a custom query, rather all I have to do is filter for the last 120 days.

Thank you for all your help. If you would like, please browse through my fine art pieces, and I will gladly send you one for your service. Email me the title you want along with your mailing address, and I will send it out to you.

hope that makes sense..

I ran into a similar issue at one time trying to change the number of posts on a search results page. I used a solution from here to fix it:
http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/21/show-a-different-number-of-posts-per-page-depending-on-context-e-g-homepage
But my first attempts at trying to get it to work on the category archive page, didn't work. Still need to test more – but maybe that gives you some more information about the problem…

http://theviolent.net/recent-works
http://theviolent.net/recent-works/page/2/ {produces the 404 error}

I tried using the $wpdb->get_results as you have in your example only to find that the "WHERE" filter was not being applied and was returning all posts.

I have tried to assign the $wp_query->found_posts and $wp_query->max_number_of_pages before the 1st query_posts call, between the two, and after the 2nd.
The following pastebin is my entire file with assignment after the 2nd query_posts.
http://pastebin.com/N1D5d3Z4

Issue 1) (This is more a note about my original post above – you weren't doing this…) The page vs paged issue may have changed. I could now only get the actual page number using:
$paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
even though I was running the test on the homepage. So that issue may now be null/void.

Issue 2) You need to get the page number BEFORE!!! you run that first "query_posts" (on your line 9 in that pastebin code)… otherwise – the page number will be based on that query_posts call which will always show the page number as "1"… So move try this instead and let me know how we do:
http://pastebin.com/ft1FiCan

The thing that probably makes this confusing is that in my example above – I pull that paged variable after my sql query – but I don't use query_posts to get the total number of posts – although that works fine.. the problem comes if you're trying to get original query vars… by pulling the total number of posts – you've just reset all those original query vars) so just grab those query vars BEFORE you change the page query…

Hopefully that makes sense.

I tried to implement the solution you offered, but am having the exact same results. Can you tell by looking if there is something obvious that I may have overlooked?

Here is a code snipet. http://pastebin.com/1Wjv7exa

Thanks,
–christopher