Display the posts within a catagory as my Homepage
 

I've seen some smokin' hot problems in my time, but this one takes the cake. I want to have my posts in a certain category show as my Homepage contents.
I do not want every post I have ever written to be displayed on the Homepage. This should be a simple setting. Yet after four hours work. I'm torched!!!!!
I don't see a way to add content to the Homepage or delete content from the Homepage. :confused:
And what ever happened to "home.php"?

UPDATE: 4-15-2010 9.24 A.M.
Like I said, I've seen some somkin' hot problems! I've also seen some smokin' hot solutions. For this problem, three words: "Advanced Category Excluder". It's a plug-in. This plug-in will let you organize for display any category, page, post, widget, or your cat's nine lives any way you want!
I absolutely marvel at someone sitting down, designing and writing this plug-in. I can just image the effort that went into this! http://ace.dev.rain.hu//

Personally, I would make a static home page and (I feel like a broken record suggesting this again, but it really is the best solution I've found) create a widget area and use the Query Posts plug in. Or actually in this case for one category, I might use the Page Links To plugin and see if I could set it up so that the home page redirects to the category page.