child_of and wp_list_cats not working

I’ve searched the forums and have been sifting through posts regarding this problem for the past 1 1/2 hours.

My problem is, I have just upgraded to WP 1.5 and I currently have some 40 categories (5 are main/top level categories) and I am currently calling wp_list_cats() twice – once for the main navigation, and again for the side panel.

1) When using wp_list_cats() for main navigation, children=0 didn’t work for me – it still displayed the sub-categories. The only way for me to get rid of the sub-categories was to exclude all 35 of them.

2) Once I got past the main nav issue, I tried to add wp_list_cats(‘child_of=$cat’) to my sidebar to call the sub-category of the main category. That didn’t work, so I added a number, and that didn’t work. I changed it to list_cats(all the rules, 1) – the 1 representing the value for child_of, and it work – however, it would only display the main categories and none of the sub-categories.

I don’t know what to do or tweak to get this working. I just want users to see the sub-categories for the main category they are on.

Any help is appreciated :).

Thanks