I came across this post after pulling my hair out for a week just trying to find out how to theme a custom view based on taxonomy as an argument. To see an example of my pain, here is my most recent post http://drupal.org/node/1516146. To see more pain, just click on my name to see the scores of unanswered questions related to the subject as well as the upteen stackoverflow requests for help. Why is this so hard? Why is it not just simple default functionality to be able to use Views or another simple method to theme a taxonomy page? Thanks for the article. I will try the different approaches, as taxonomy is useless for my needs if there is not a simple and easy way to interact with it.