When you are viewing category links in links.php each category is normally expressed as /links.php?category=yourcategory
so i hacked that into
/linkscategory/yourcategory/
Then created a new folder called linkscategory and then created a .htaccess document in this new folder.
the Mod_Rewrite rules in this doc are:
RewriteBase /linkscategory/
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ /links.php?category=$1 [NC,L]