This is a category archive plugin. It displays a list of all categories, along with the first x posts for each category.
The plugin lives at http://www.neato.co.nz/plugins/category_archive.txt.
To install, copy the contents of that file to your plugins directory; enable the plugin; then make a call to the get_category_archive($limit, $parent) function.
$limit specifies the number of posts to get for each category; and $parent specifies the parent id. If the $parent parameter is left blank, then all of the categories will be retrieved. Alternately, if a category id is specified, only the categories under that category will be retrieved.
The output takes the form of a set of divs, with the specified CSS class names.
categoryarchive
categoryarchivename
categoryarchivedesc
categoryarchiveposts
neato.co.nz 
thanks. Submitted it to the WP forums.
Can you call more than one category in the parent-id thing?
like get_category_archive($limit=none, $parent=1,2,3,4) and the rest are ignored? I’d like an archive page for all my categories bar certain ones that I am calling as pages already.
By the by, have you seen this? http://weblogtoolscollection.com/pluginblog/