Sidebar Text Widget as Exclusive Category Feed

I've worked on this for over a week, searched BFA and still cannot solve the problems. I hope someone can help me.

I created a text widget to show the latest posts from a particular category [Audio-Video] in a sidebar.

Here are the 2 problems:

1. I want to exclude the category from showing up in the center column.

2. Except on the home page, the entire text of the post shows up in the sidebar. It does not keep the excerpt limit.

See the site here....

Note the right-inner sidebar section: Latest Audio-Video

It looks OK on the home page but on all others the entire sidebar is filled with the full text of the post.