Ghost categories? Says 30 but nothing there.

I've got something strange going on with one of my Opencart installs. I started having a problem with nested Categories not showing up when I went to link products. The parent would show but not the nested ones.

I got frustrated and deleted all the categorizes to start over and it still says I have 30 of them, 2 pages worth.


And now the sites /admin/index.php is drawing excessive resources. Wth is happening?
There has been no adjustments made to the core or any files. I installed Jays per item shipping module but there were no files altered.

Is anything showing in your category_path table. You will need phpmyadmin to see this.
If not, try this for starters - select all the categories and click the [Repair] button.
See if that works.

Thanks JTY.
There was tables in the category_path tables.
I also tried the repair button but it did nothing except say the repair was successful. I wonder now if clicking that button does nothing more then trigger the tool note. lol

I went into the database and deleted all categories as a last ditch effort. Then went back into the admin and low and behold the category list was zero.
But upon adding all my cats back it still would not show nested cats when i tried to link a product to them...only parent cats.
Out of frustration and desperation I just deleted the whole directory, and database, and started all over.

AND it still wont work
Complete uninstall, reinstall all new files, whole new database...
I am beyond figuring this out now. I have several stores and several with nested cats...never had a problem. What am I doing wrong?
Nested cats show up as I create them but they wont show up under the links tab when I try to link a product to them. Thought maybe the names were too similar and confusing the db tables...tried changing the names...to no avail. I dont understand.

Categories listed under Categories tab




And they become unavailable under the prodcut "links' tab



Anyone have any ideas why this is happening? I've never had this happen before.

How about trying repair again? It should appear. Alternatively, try looking into your vqcache file and see if there's any vqmods altering the way it works

Thanks MarketInSG,
There doesnt appear to be anything in vqcache altering it. Afterwards I went through the motions of replacing my indexes and removing Vqmod all together, because for some reason with it installed both index files are getting hammered with excessive resource usage.
With Vqmod out of the picture I went back in and the nested cats still dont show up when trying to link a product. What I did discover now though is that if I enter a "Z" instead of an"S" they nested cats will show. I dont think any of my other OC installs act like this.