Lost posts… but they still seem to be there?! Help!

Oh dear…. I have a big problem and I hope somebody here can help. Here’s what happened:

I have about 10 categories in my blog and all of a sudden today, the category page for cat=2 stopped working. it just loaded a blank page and when I “view source” I saw nothing. It was absolutely blank.

All my other categories were fine and I could load their respective category pages (i.e. domain.com/blog?cat=3), but cat=2 just kept being blank.

So, I deleted that category. All the posts should have gone into the DEFAULT category, right? For some reason they did not go! I could not find them anywhere! I had about 45 posts, and they all vanished.

Luckily, I backup all my posts in individual text files offline, so I made the DEFAULT category into the old cat=2. You follow so far?

Now I have no “Uncategorized” category, and the default category is now the old cat=2, right? So I just finished uploading all 45 posts again into this category and there is still a problem…

I can now visit the category page–it works fine and loads! However, none of the posts show up on that category page!!! I can see them in the archives and I can see in the Admin panel that the category is supposed to have 45 posts, but the page domain.com/blog?cat=1 shows that there are no posts in that category!!

Does anyone know what happened?