As I said in my previous post, I did change the home page to a static page, but that caused the problem: the menu item "home" still appears in the navigation menu and sends you to a post listing. Likewise, the page I created and set as the static landing page leads to the post listing, as well.
I opened this as a problem ticket with my hosting company, and they think this is due to a but in Wordpress 3.5.1. Is there any confirmation for this?