This is neither a woody, nor a potato or a sid issue. The behaviour of LaTeX concerning page non-numbering with \pagestyle{empty} and \thispagestyle{empty} also depends on the other packages which are loaded at the beginning of the file, some of which can re-initialise page numbers.
Have a look at the LaTeX FAQ. Olivier. -- Olivier Crouzet, Ph.D. Institut des Sciences Cognitives CNRS - Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1