Hi Pali,
Thanks for reply. Indeed, I used phpMyAdmin in read-only mode to just confirm that everything is hunkydory. I am not sure what happened with this category.
Could not find anything on Google either.
Although, as a quick work-around, since there was no semantic relevance attached to this category, I just created another category and associated it to all posts.(well, will be adding 200 posts everyday to it). This works for me for now.