aBigHairySpider

And, after thinking for 10 more seconds, I don’t believe it could be intended for the paged value to be removed because templates need it to present the proper links for Older and Newer posts.

Yours is certainly a logical line of thinking, but the code as installed with 3.0.4 on this site definitely makes no sense.

A quick search brings up lots of complaints in the last year alone about 404’s that sound similar along with intricate stories of how people got things to work. Perhaps under certain conditions the “paged” query value is filtered out, and the 404 handler expects that to have happened, but I didn’t find any evidence of any attempts to do such a thing.

The whole idea of: “Hey, I found a category as asked,” and: “If someone is looking for a specific page then puke,” seems, on the surface, a silly one.

But, I’m not suggesting anyone change anything — I just posted this in case someone is stuck.

That’s not a custom query. It’s a simple category query for the second page.

The 404 handler is in error deciding to display a 404 when (a) there was a result, and (b) the user expects any page but the first. So, if paged= ended up in the query string, it decided the information it found wasn’t worth displaying.

It’s a bug, sorry.

In this case, the core file had a bug.