Main page open in category view

Hi,
I am having a strange issue with one of my carts. Here's a little background. The cart has only one main category with several sub-categories under it. What I want to do is have the cart home page open in that one main category. I have tried every possible setting in the admin section. I can have the cart open on any one of the sub-category pages as the home page, but it seems that I can only have the main category open as an afterthought on the home page, with or without the category listing showing on the left (that seems to be the only thing that changing from 0 to 1 does for that setting)... My only other choice is to elete all content from the main page and see what happens then.....

OK, this is not really a satisfactory result, but it worked. I edited out all of the content on the main page, then I set the "Main page opens with category" to "1" and now it opens with the sub-categories listes as if I were on the main category page, but it still has the "Welcome guest, would you like to login?" text on there. I can either edit that section or ask the client if that is OK.

admin > config > Layout Settings > Customer Greeting - Show on Index Page > set to "0"