Limiting Archives to a specific category

I’m not really too clear on how the filtering code works, but I’ve seen some recommendations on using add/apply_filter to alter the archive query to accomplish per-category archive lists, eg: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/remove-cetain-post-categories-from-blog-sidebar-archive-list?replies=9

In my category pages, I want a sidebar with just that category’s archives linked, but in other parts of the site I want the default behavior. Using the filter method will end up in all calls to get_archives() being altered. Is there any way to work around that without basically rewriting get_archives?

I’ve already got code to deal with category-specific archives, so I now have urls like this available:

example.com/category/foobar/2012/09/ (shows only posts in 9/2012 in category foobar)

But I need to build a nice link list for that… Any clever ideas?