Pagination hell, please help

Hi Folks,

Am tearing my hair out, hope someone can see what I cannot. After much research, I’ve compiled the following snippets in order to paginate both my category pages (standard loop) and my blog home home page, which runs on a custom WP_query (because I only want to show 2 posts at a time vs. the 9 defined in my settings for categories).

Pagination works fine for the categories, but for the blog page, I get stuck on page 5 > page 6 turns up a 404 not found.

This bit of code is in my functions.php :

function jlg_pagination($type = 'plain', $endsize = 1, $midsize = 1) {
    global $wp_query, $wp_rewrite;
    $current = get_query_var( 'paged' ) > 1 ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;

    // Sanitize input argument values
    if ( ! in_array( $type, array( 'plain', 'list', 'array' ) ) ) $type = 'plain';
    $endsize = absint( $endsize );
    $midsize = absint( $midsize );

    // Setup argument array for paginate_links()
    $pagination = array(
        'base'      => @add_query_arg( 'paged', '%#%' ),
        'format'    => '',
        'total'     => $wp_query->max_num_pages,
        'current'   => $current,
        'show_all'  => false,
        'end_size'  => $endsize,
        'mid_size'  => $midsize,
        'type'      => $type,
        'prev_text' => '<',
        'next_text' => '>'
    );

    if ( $wp_rewrite->using_permalinks() )
        $pagination['base'] = user_trailingslashit( trailingslashit( remove_query_arg( 's', get_pagenum_link( 1 ) ) ).'page/%#%/', 'paged' );

    if ( ! empty( $wp_query->query_vars['s'] ) )
        $pagination['add_args'] = array( 's' => get_query_var( 's' ) );

    return paginate_links( $pagination );

}

and this is my custom loop (I’ve tried both in index.php and in a template page – same result) :

$paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
			$wp_query = new WP_Query ( array('showposts' => 2, 'paged' => $paged) );
				while ( $wp_query->have_posts() ) : $wp_query->the_post(); ?>

Anyone see where the problem might be?

many thanks,
-jennyb

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