Honestly. I seem to be having the same problem with the site I am currently developing. I have searched through many a thread, and there seems to be no answer to this specific question. The only thing I have found information about is using the $paged variable in query_posts, which is not my problem…
For further information on the problem plz check out This Page … If you scroll to the bottom and attempt to navigate to the previously posted articles, it loads my index.php file…. Which suggests… Is pagination developed to be used on the “front page”? Would the fact that it’s supposed to be loading my “category.php” page be causing this problem?
Hey… Mr. Pumpkin, by sheer luck I stumbled across this fix. I think it will solve your problem also.
http://barefootdevelopment.blogspot.com/2007/11/fix-for-wordpress-paging-problem.html
It appears that there is a problem with our permalink structure, whereby wordpress thinks the “/page/” listing in the href is actually a postname. If anyone knows what I should be putting in my .htaccess file (instead of needing to use the aforementioned plugin) plz post this here. This issue is very poorly documented.