>I am just noticing trouble when I try to create instances of my base pageframe class. Specifically, how do I deal with pagecount? For instances using fewer pages than the base, the extra (blank) pages appear on the right of page frames using fewer pages than are on the base frame.. Attempting to remove them by reducing the pagecount produces an error because the pages are members of a parent class. Reducing the number of pages in the base class to 1 to make sure that all instances have more, produces funny errors when I attempt to load the form. How do you deal with this?

Why you are setting the number of pages to 1, why not 2 ?
can you tell the errors you're getting when loading the form.