nicer archives headaches

hi,
i’ve been trying to integrate the nicer archives plugin/hack with my installation of wp 1.5, but just keep running into different problems:
-The original source is written for an older version of wp, and thus does not integrate with the theme correctly. having said that, it otherwise works perfectly. there are no new versions for 1.5, as far as i can tell.
-trying to apply the fixes mentioned elsewhere on these forums yields no joy- I’ve tried the ezstatic plugin to do this (just get a blank page), tried making the code changes mentioned to bring the template in (which works, but then i am limited to showing n number of posts; the “perpage” plugin doesn’t seem to help here either.

so… right now i am sacrificing form for function; if you look at http://www.surrealroad.com/digital/master_archive.php you’ll see the archive works, but does not use the template.
if anyone has any pointers, i’d appreciate it