[Plugin: My Category Order] Limits before establishing order?

Hi all,

I’m using the plugin My Category Order and I easily got it to work:
<?php wp_list_categories('orderby=order&title_li=&style=none&hierarchical=false') ?>
.. works like a charm as you can see here.

On the homepage, however, I only want to output the first 3 categories when ordered by “order”.
You’d think this would be easy to establish by adding the parameter “number=3” as in:
<?php wp_list_categories('orderby=order&title_li=&style=none&hierarchical=false&number=3') ?>
..but this doesn’t work as expected. It appears that the ordering by order is done after the limiting, resulting in an output of three irrelevant items, which are then ordered by “order”. I use this plugin in combination with the “Category & Page I c o n s” plugin to add the images to the wp_list_categories-output.
wp-version is 3.0.1.

Any help would be appreciated.
I should note I’m not particularly looking for a fix for the issue of the plugin not working, I’m merely trying to echo the first three items of the orderby=order wp_list_categories. The “number=3” simply doesn’t seem to fit the job. Any workaround will do.

Thnx in advance!

https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/my-category-order/