Archive Index with Posts in Sidebar

Hi all,

I’m trying to wrap my head around the best way to do this. I have a sidebar that I am using to display the_excerpt and a thumbnail of the archives of the currently browsed category. When you select one of them it should show the single.php for that post but keep the archives list in the sidebar. I can’t get this to work. When you land on the archives page it works fine, but as soon as you select one of the posts from the sidebar and navigate to that posts single.php, the sidebar also changes to a displaying a single post.

So obviously I am using the wrong loop in the sidebar. Currently, is is using the archive version of the loop (ie I pulled it from archive.php). How should I be doing this? I can’t just pull an archive list as they are styled little blocks of image and copy.

Thanks!