Excluding Categories From Parent

I have got this plugin to work for everything nicely with the exception of one thing. I already found the other thread relating to this but it does not work for me at:

http://ww.wp.xz.cn/support/topic/plugin-display-posts-shortcode-how-do-you-exclude-a-category-from-the-posts?replies=5

All this does is break my site, whether I place it in the function.php or anywhere else. I simply need to exclude categories from the parent and I cannot figure out how to do this. Has anyone done this with success?

Thank you in advance.

http://ww.wp.xz.cn/extend/plugins/display-posts-shortcode/