I saw something similar with Office X once I got to Leopard on my machine....worked fine for my needs through OS X 10.4.x, but started to misbehave once I got up to OS X 10.5.x...
I haven't experience any problems in 10.6.5 and Office 2004 11.6.2, although both updates are recent. Couple of curious things with Word....
1. This morning I noticed the Save function is not adding the .doc extension and I am having to do it manually. I don't know if that was the case yesterday but it's probably a safe assumption.
Additional info: I almost forgot...it seems to me there was a box in Word Preferences where you chose to have the .doc extension added. I looked through every preference but could not find that checkbox.
2. If I go to "About Word" it says the version is 11.6.1 even though I did the update to 11.6.2.
All of that being said, it still wouldn't explain why Pages is acting similarly.
ryck