what's wrong with this method?

[eluser]pickupman[/eluser]
Since, it's hard to know what's going on the rest of the code, the only thing I could suggest is start dumping vars, and see if you are always getting the results from your DB.
What happens when you don't use your rss library? Have you tried the Simplepie library? RSS should be pretty straightforward. Make sure you are first fetching your data from the feeds first, and keep adding stuff back into parsing until you get your results.