Is the "Count content views" settings related to the "Discard access logs older than" option?
According my review, I confirm that "Most popular" default statistics (Drupal 6), give the "most popular" "al time" since "Count content views" option was enabled.

So, I reviewed several modules like Statspro, Visitors, Quickstats, Reports and Radioactivity, and I chose Radioactivity to solve this. Radioactivity give results, per day, very close to Analytics.