Something may have changed about the printing of the Page 1 is concerned.
The following macro will however print all of the page 1's in the one print
job so that if you are printing to .pdf, just one file will be created:

Dim i As Long, pstring As String
pstring = "p1s1"
For i = 2 To ActiveDocument.Sections.Count
pstring = pstring & ",p1s" & i
Next i
ActiveDocument.PrintOut Range:=wdPrintFromTo, From:=pstring

I think however that you are mistaken by thinking that before you "could
print and each section would be duplexed and collated
without having to run a macro." A macro has always been required for that.

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

"Kara" wrote in message
news
I'm currently using Word 2003 and am curious if there was an update that
changed they way I used to be able to print documents...

Previously after a mail merge I could tell it to print page 1, and it
would
print the first page of every section. This was helpful because I could
then
print to a PDF and have the main information from the first page grouped
together. Now printing page 1 only prints the first page. I've used a
macro
posted in previous posts, but this makes the process incredibly slower as
it
send each 1st page to the printer seperately, so instead of having one 50
page document, there are 50 one page documents to be spooled individually.
I
would also not be able to print to a PDF without having 50 individual
files
that I'd have to name and save separately.

Also, before I could print and each section would be duplexed and collated
without having to run a macro. It would staple and duplex the three pages
and
I'd have 50 packets. Now since it's an odd paged document the duplexing is
off and it tries to staple the every section together.

Did something change recently that removed the way things print, or have I
formatted things wrong?

Thank you for any help you can provide!