Niels wrote:(I still do not understand why the page layouts need to be published in the default case...)
I had a similar thing happen for me, except that it was an image. I don't recall exactly what I had done to make the error happen, but it turns out that I was calling one particular image the wrong way, and so Flare saw it at a linked resource and so included that image as a standalone file that "sat next to" the Word doc that was generated. I wonder if there is someplace a direct link from a topic to the page layout file, so the page layout file is being output as a linked resource. Typically, page layouts are associated with TOC items, not directly with topics.
HTH