Reply icon problems in Mail, and Opening Apps Word, Excel

Hi

I have two major problems with Lion.

1.) In Lion if a conversation email is open and lets say I've replied to the first email, if i get a new email from that person it shows it as being replied to. (Unless you open the collosapable icon then it shows which ones have been replied to.)

This is very annoying as all my business staff, when glansing at emails think they've replied to some, when in fact they have not.

How can we fix this or sort this problem out?

2.) When we open Excel or Word, it seems to open any recent documents we've had open and this is very frustrating. Especially if your showing someone a document and you don't want private documents popping up. Any ideas?

Really appreciate your helps

Mark Brown