well I ended up cheating and using a gridview control. I set the paging to true with a pagesize of 5 and then made the pager invisible.

I know it's not ideal because 1) gridview renders a table, and I wanted a list and of course 2) GridView is clientside paging, meaning it read all of the data instead of the first X rows and stopping...

BUT, it works, for now, until I find a more efficient solution. suggestions are still appreciated!

thanks