A couple of weeks ago I asked in a headline post

I recently updated to WordPress three point something… and lost the titles from my sidebar.

Are these related ? or have I done something else wrong ?

The answer is that they are related. It seems that there was a loophole in WordPress that the theme I use was exploiting to generate the category title on the main page by using a php function that “can” only be used in a category archive page.
Wordpress 3.0 changed code so the function no longer will work on anything but a category archive page…. but after a few hours of searching aroud the WordPress codex forum pages I found a workaround to display the category titles as they used to be – hoorah !