[Plugin: WP-Paginate] Shows 3 pages when there are only 2

I am having the same problem. There are a couple posts on this plugin that shows the same issue. Does anyone have a quick work around for this. I am inclined to use a :last class on the CSS that stops the last <li> from being displayed.
Here is the code that I am using on the archive.php page. Any help is much appreciated:

[Code moderated as per the Forum Rules. Please use the pastebin]

Alright I did some tinkering around and apparently the culprit of the problem rests with the posts_per_page condition. Once I changed it to this:

<div class="c3 ptxxx pbxxx">
<h1 class="cap cnt shd pbxx">Latest News in Downtown Asheville</h1>
<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php $paged = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1; query_posts("&cat=30&paged=$paged"); ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<?php static $count1 = 1; ?>
<div class="c <?php if($count1%3==0) { echo 'last'; } ?>">

…. more code below but not relevant

That shows 10 articles with the pagination being correct. However, thinking that if I just changed the General preferences in dashboard / Reading to 9 blog posts articles … it still stuck with 10. This is decent enough cause at least I am not encountering an error.

Does anyone know of a thread that can have the tweak:

1. support an offset (so that the featured story doesn’t repeat)
doing this, disables the pagination from working
2. control the posts_per_page count
doing this, generates an additional page in the pagination that leads to a 404 nowhere page

In my case the problem was simple:
There was a difference between the “reading settings” number of posts to show and the settings in the “query_posts .. &posts_per_page=”

Once I made them the same, the problem vanished.