How can I look up the number of items in a Drupal View?
You can get the amount of results in a view using their API calls. 

&lt;?php
$views = view::load("viewname");
$view-&gt;set_display('default'); //optional, could be default, OR the name of a specific display
$views-&gt;execute();
echo count($views-&gt;result);
?&gt;


I tested this on views 3 (the current version). For further reading, check out http://groups.drupal.org/node/10129. It's written for views 2, but still relevant.