Front page post excerpts linking to category ‘page’?

Hi all – hope you can help.

//EDIT – short version of the message below:
In a nutshell what I’m trying to achieve is to remove the category base for post ‘read more’ links BUT only for posts from the homepage, and not throughout the site. Is this possible?
//END EDIT

Using wordpress as a CMS has been a pretty good experience although I’m having trouble ironing out the last few kinks where CMS and Blog meet, mix and get messed up…

I have a site in development, on the homepage of which I’m displaying excerpts (with thumbnails and read more links) of 2 posts placed within a ‘featured-on-homepage’ category.

These posts also belong within their own categories too, i.e. ‘advice’ and ‘event-diary’. I also have static pages set up (like a CMS) with each show posts from one of the above mentioned categories. I’ve given these pages the same names as the categories to help my poor brain keep things organized.

For the homepage only I would like these posts to clink to the pages which have the same name as the category and not the single post page or archive page. (i.e. clicking on a post from ‘advice’ category on the home page would take the view to the ‘Advice’ static page. Hope that makes sense…

I’ve managed to get pretty close, by removing the category base universally from the permalink with the ‘no category base’ plugin, which works for me as the permalink then matches my static page URL which is what I want but form the homepage only. This breaks other things though (i.e. monthly archives for a specific category no longer properly without a category base and I end up back on the static page)…

This is actually harder to explain than I realised!

In a nutshell what I want is to remove the category base but only for post links on the home page, and not throughout the site. Is this possible? I realise its a bit hacky…

Is there a function or plug that can do this? Anyway of creating the loop that shows posts on the home page so the link excludes category base? Could I do via tweaking the .htaccess file so it only affects the homepage?

Any help huuugely appreciated
Thanks
Stef