[eluser]wabu[/eluser]
Oh, your edit about removing the where functions must have crossed with my last post . . .
From your first post it sounds like other queries are working, so how about temporarily eliminating the join? I know you mentioned the table definitely has data, so barring a connection error which doesn't seem to be the case it must be the query itself?
Can you run the join query successfully in phpMyAdmin (assuming it has that capability)?
Another suggestion is to keep simplifying the model code until you start seeing results.