Tammy, exactly what versions of OpenACS and AOLserver are you using?
I wrote that bit of Static Pages code that seems to be giving you
trouble, and in my experience (at least on AOLserver 3.3+ad13), this
code:
nsv_array set $nsv [list]
does always create an empty nsv. If that is not the case on
some other version of AOLserver or something, then I'll want to track
down why and do something about it...