I had a similar problem and I couldn’t find a widget like this so I made one myself. It is the first version, I hope it is useful. It lists only the child categories of the current main category. You can find the plugin here.
Thank you lonetrotter! I had the same problem and I’ve solved it thanks to you. I’ve changed the cat in category_name in order to use category names with permalinks.
<?php
$events_cat = ‘xxxx’;
if (!is_paged()) {
query_posts(‘showposts=10&category_name=’ . $events_cat);
} else {
query_posts(‘showposts=10&category_name=’ . $events_cat . ‘&paged=’ . $paged);
}
?>
<?php include(TEMPLATEPATH.”/index.php”);?>