Steven Zahm@ Mike
Ok, now I see … helps a lot!
Well, the short answer would be that the next major release of Connections and the Widget Pack would address this [eta, couple months]. A couple weeks ago I added my first stab at rewriting the logic for retrieving categories, extremely robust. The purpose, so I can add features to the category widget such as parent and child of options which is exactly what you want.
You could pull that code early and write you own category widget. It is here, the entire cnTerm class:
https://github.com/Connections-Business-Directory/Connections/blob/develop/includes/class.terms.php#L742
You would use cnTerm::get() to retrieve the categories. Just pass in the options that you need.
Since the class is not finished … it is a bit db query intensive since it does not have a caching built in yet.