Trouble with excluding categories in sidebar
 

I want to exclude recent posts in 2 categories from showing up in the front page excerpts and in the Recent Articles (Posts) list in the left sidebar. I had this working, using the Enhanced Recent Posts plugin widget, but now it's suddenly not working! I swear I didn't make any changes. I've been traveling for a day or two and wasn't even working on the site.

I have deactivated and reactivated the plugin, to no effect. One of the categories is cooperating: Obituaries. The other, Letters to the Editors, is not. Is that because it's a child category?

Any ideas, other than making it a parent? I want to keep it under Opinion.

I tried your PHP code widget idea, to no avail. Perhaps code is needed to work with the child category?