Chen once again proves he is the master.
It does work, and avoids the subject problem as well. Which leads me to ask, what's not nice about it?
Love that last10 hack of yours. I use it in two places - a new threads box at the top of my (non-php) homepage, where I renamed it to last5 and heavily edited it so it would only show very basic info and uses my CSS classes, and a separate instance I left intact as last10 that I am using in a template to provide an overal new post summary page with vb. I modified it a little, actually - added some more variables so I can make links for the forum name, etc different colors.
Thanks again!