Here is what I had done to get it to not work. 1. I changed the items per page to 45 2. Filtered on War deployments. 3. Refresh the page. 4. Try to change the items per page to anything else no longer works.
this is YET ANOTHER fall-out of ajax-y partial page requests. since we're not actually updating the dom history, the browser never records that you've changed filter (in this case to war deployments). so when you refresh the page, what you see is not the real state of things. if you were to change the filter, and then change the paging, things work properly. you should notice that after you refresh you'll see ALL of the original items (as if no filter was applied) even though the filter still shows, in this case, war deployments.
This bug was previously known as http://jira.rhq-project.org/browse/RHQ-191
Closing per 25-Aug triage.