I posted this elsewhere but I thought it would be relevant to this topic. I use a single .htaccess file outside of my blog directory to handle my rewrites so the automatic updates for pages were giving me some grief. To get round this I wrote a generic RewriteRule that should (ha!) handle all requests for pages:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^.*/$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*/)?(.*)/$ /blog/index.php?pagename=$2 [QSA,L]
The first RewriteCond checks whether the requested URI ends with a "/" character. The second checks whether the URI refers to a directory that exists. If it does not, then I assume that it is a request for a WP page. The RewriteRule gets invoked to redirect to the appropriate page in WordPress. This saves having to continually edit the WP .htaccess file as new pages are created.
The downside to the assumption is that, if it is not actually a request for a page, then WP has to handle dishing back the 404 error code.
David