I am working on a guide that I'm putting up on my site but I'm going to post the rough draft here first. It's about how to exclude the hide duplicate posts rule from certain sections of the homepage. If this is inappropriate please delete.

slideshow.php
While the problem seems complicated the fix is actually very easy. The solution required editing a couple php files but we will only be commenting out code so anybody regardless of coding knowledge can do it. Commenting out php code tells the particular line of code not to run and is done using only two characters (//). The first file we need to edit is arras/library/slideshow.php which obviously controls the slideshow. Go to line 16 and you should see:

'exclude'            => $post_blacklist,

We will need to comment out this line of code by putting // in front of it. The code at line 16 should now look like:

//'exclude'            => $post_blacklist,

What we just did was tell the slideshow not to look into other post sections to see what they are displaying. Now we want to tell it not to allow other post sections to look in the slideshow to see what it’s displaying. To do that go to line 48 and you should see:

arras_blacklist_duplicates(); // required for duplicate posts function to work.

Just like before we need to comment out this line of code. After you comment it out is should look like this:

//arras_blacklist_duplicates(); // required for duplicate posts function to work.

home.php
Now that we’ve gotten the slideshow to work the way we want it’s time to comment out the exclude rule in home.php which control what you see on the homepage. In my case I want the featured posts #2 not to look at other post sections to see what posts they are showing. Simply go to line 58 and you should see the following line of code:

'exclude'            => $post_blacklist,

We need to comment out that line of code so that it looks like this:

//'exclude'            => $post_blacklist,

Now the homepage functions exactly the way I want it too. If you need other post sections on the homepage to not follow the rule all you have to do is comment out the 'exclude'            => $post_blacklist, line for each post section you want to ignore the rule. Each section is clearly labeled in the home.php file. If there is enough interest in it I will show you how to actually make these edits and option that shows up in the theme options page.