Archives not showing next/prev – windows only? crazy?

Hi I am going crazy here, so thought I’d post this just in case any one else has some ideas or can help m e see what I am not seeing.

On my local windows apache server, the blog pages and the archives are not showing the next/prev posts, not matter how many posts I specify in the settings or how many posts I have.

I have re downloaded and installed wp 3.0 manually. Deactivated all plugins, reinstalled twentyten 1.0 in case it was that, but it appears to be theme independent and still happens when no plugins – this is happening to all themes.

I managed to track it down in includes>query.php to
‘found_posts’ being 0 (although posts are displaying and not_found is false)
which makes max_num_pages = 0, which means the “links” get skipped when loop.php checks it.

This is not happening on my remote servers (also on 3.0 and 2010 theme).

I have googled and tried checking the trac, but did not see anything that may explain or relate.

I have to leave this a bit and somehow test my new plugin without this, but it is concerning. I had some weird query post behavior too where ‘post_per_page’ = -1 did not appear to work and was wondering if it is related?

Anyone shed any light?