I'm trying out the "Roles and Capabilities" plugin by Owen, and I found a little glitch that I'm pretty sure is in the WP core rather than in the plugin:
The capability "Edit Pages" can be turned on, but it doesn't work. Until you also turn on "Edit Posts" the Write and Manage menus do not show up. I tried to go directly to edit-pages.php bypassing the menus, and that indicated a lack of permissions as well.
I know this sounds silly for a "normal" blog, but I'm using WP as a lite CMS here, and there aren't any posts, and I want to save the "normal" users from seeing them and having a chance to mess up with them.