Excluded Category in Main Page Question

I’ve tried a couple of different plug ins to exclude a particular category from the main page (“Site News”). I also have a widget in my sidebar showing the most recent 5 posts from the excluded category, using the following PHP:

<?php $recent = new WP_Query(“cat=37&showposts=5”); while($recent->have_posts()) : $recent->the_post();?>
• ” rel=”bookmark”> <?php the_title(); ?>

<?php endwhile; ?>

This works for every page but the main page, no posts are shown in the widget when I have the category excluded from the main page. Any ideas for a workaround?