Brian,
Thanks for the suggestions. It turns out that the behavior I am observing is in fact a function of how Joomla assigns different itemIDs for articles in the front page than it does in their content areas. I found a Joomla forum article where one of the programmers describes a work-around for this issues. You can find that article at
Joomla! Community Forum • View topic - Major bug in the changes to item id's - 1.0.12.