I mentioned that I was running 7.5.3p2, and not just 7.5.3. Fully aware of the security issue that was raised and I was patched accordingly.
The URLs provided were fictious, only to illustrate that regardless of which "page" you were viewing in a particular forum, you'd always be stuck on the first.
Having said that, I ended up installing 7.5.6 on a test server and it did appear to fix the problem of the topic list not paginating.
I agree with you that updating with each release is good practice, but I tend to hold back when the release notes don't have anything I'm too concerned with, or critical -- mainly so I don't have to re-do all my mods (I'm lazy).
