MichaelH

Use the static front page ability via Administration > Settings > Reading and in the Page Template don’t use wp_header/footer and just put the code you want–to list pages for example:

<?php
wp_list_pages();
?>

Related:
wp_list_pages()

You might want to review http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/vote-it-up/installation/ as it does sound like you can display data for each post e.g. <?php DisplayVotes(get_the_ID()); ?> and you could probably use wpdb on the votes table to order posts.

Solution 1
If allowed by your host, putting this in an .htaccess file will solve the problem:
DirectoryIndex index.html index.htm index.php

Solution 2
Some hosts allow you to make a change, via their hosting control panel, to the DirectoryIndex. It’s typically described as Indexes or Index documents, but may also require you to type something like
DirectoryIndex index.html index.htm index.php
or specify index.php as an index type file.

Solution 3
Instruct Apache to treat index.php as an index file. If you own the server, or have access to the http.conf file, simply modify the DirectoryIndex line in httpd.conf to:
DirectoryIndex index.html index.htm index.php

Solution 4
Contact your host

This has a widget
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/vote-it-up/

By your own statement you have 3 servers so maybe one is different than the other.

Also could be a PHP memory issue.

Also might find http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/core-control/ and see if transports are working.

Might look at the Order field when writing/editing a page.

Also consider this techinque so you only have to worry about pages in your menu:
How to easily display links to both Pages and Categories in the blog navigation header?

Note–I deleted duplicate topic you started.

Then update your permalinks by visiting Administration > Settings > Permalinks and clicking on Save Changes