Hello Jeff, Compact Archives is so ugly and plain txt, boring, lack of life, that makes me feel sick. Looks like a component from the 90's when some weirdoes coded with Word.

One good solution I've found are these two plugins:

One is the Archives Calendar Widget, which will showcase the post count (and only your posts) in a beautiful, easy to setup, jquery based, yearly calendar, which you can use in a widget or using the shortcode in any page.
http://wordpress.org/plugins/archives-calendar-widget/

And the other one is the PS Auto Sitemap, which will allow you to build a complete and detailed sitemap, with all your posts and pages, effortless and without hogging your server resources.
http://wordpress.org/plugins/ps-auto-sitemap/

I have these two in my personal website with nearly 500 posts since 2008 and both them work nice and with no problems.

Just as aside: I bet almost nobody in the world navigate to an archive page. From my own experience: my website receive nearly 250K monthly visits, and only 22 individuals have reviewed the archive page (0,0088%? is the math ok?). I'm considering to erase that page.

Happy holidays to all of you guys!