Open recent bug in Pages, Keynote

Question

I don't know about Numbers because I don't use it.
When opening either of these apps, the Open Recent dropdown menu is dysfunctional and resists any fix tried so far. Also, even after Clear menu has been activated, the same 3 'previously used' documents appear in the list after restart.
I have deleted iwork preference files, and I have been into System Preferences and checked that in previous documents, it does NOT say None. However, I have set that to None, restarted, opened Pages and it has duly cleared previous docs. Returning to Sys Prefs and re-setting prev docs to 10/50 etc, the same 3 documents (which in fact are NOT the last three documents  opened by the way) are there like a recurring nightmare.
I have checked this and other forums for an answer, but the only consistent theme is that there are plenty of people out there suffering from it but there appears to be no solid, permanent cure. Many people have found Sys Prefs set to none, and changing that to 10 solves it temporarily only.
I'd appreciate any  help with this. Would a re-install help maybe?
Cheers
Chris

Answer 1

Since it is almost certainly a problem with the preference file, a reinstall should do nothing to help.
For Pages, the recent items list is stored in the file "com.apple.iWork.Pages.LSSharedFileList.plist" under Preferences in the User Library (at least on my Snow Leopard system). Since the same three files continue to show up, it sounds like you did not successfully delete that file. Since more recent items apparently do not get added to the list, I would suspect a problem with permissions on that file. You should have read and write priveleges to it.