240 comes with a categories ... plugin or widget - I forget which, but it's there and it works.

On the permalinks thing: it might be because your server doesn't support "pretty" URLs. Of the top of my head I can't recall the wording, but on your Blog settings->pick a blog->URLs subtab there is always an option for "&this=that&foo=bar" type of URLs, and a couple of options for this/that/foo/bar type of URLs. Change yours to the first type and see if everything works again.

you were absolutely right about the permalinks. I have reverted to not-so-pretty links and it is working well.

The issue remains with my broken category plugin. it is supposed to be part of the core and should have installed with the rest but I searched through my download of version 2.4 and the file plugins/_categories.plugin.php was nowhere to be found. there is no folder or file for the categories plugin so I assume that is why my back office is listing it as unable to be read. I took a peek in the CVS respository just to see if it was in there (becuase the download link for version 2.4 is currently pointing to the downloads index page instead of to the download area) but it was not there either. Am I looking in the wrong place? or is my back office looking in the wrong place?

Thanks!
Amy

I may have found something here. I notice that the categories plugin is attempting to link to the categories by extra path links such as:

b2evolution/index.php/c29/?blog=5

remember how my permalinks could not handle such beauty? could that be the problem here? although that does not explain why my back office is telling me that the plugin is broken.

what do you think?

Thanks!
Amy

All better now - it seems that the clean URLs were the root of all the problems. i set them all back and everything is working now. The global setting -> plugins install tab still claims the categories plugin is broken but everything on the blog is working correctly now so I call that good enough!

THANKS!!

Amy