Thanks esmi, but this doesn’t fix the sorting issue of the posts.
I tried a fix suggested in one of the replies for this forum post: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/query_posts-and-order-by-date
He commented out a $groupby declaration within the query.php file in his WP 2.5.1.
I found the similar line of code in my query.php (WP3.1.2) line 2234:
if ( !empty( $this->tax_query->queries ) || !empty( $q['meta_key'] ) ) {
//$groupby = "{$wpdb->posts}.ID"; when excluding category ID this reverses sorting of posts to ASC by postdate
}
This fixed the specific post list I needed to target and after a cursory review of several post lists throughout the site, it does not appear to have broken anything.
