i have the same problem as Gina. mostly dinners but also new flowers sometimes. i know í havnt accepted them in any page but and when i go to apps and games page it only loads up PT no dinner or flower in my items.

I cant say this is very true. I have over 100 Dinners just sitting there that have never been collected. They are all the Thank You gifts. Amazingly all of the other ones clear as soon as they are accepted. When you play for hours a day and send out 100s of gifts surly you should be getting more than 1 or 2 meals a day. The request to help someone always shows up in the Zynga mail. They know that this is an issue because I have been emailing them back and forth all week with this exact problem. It is also happening with the new flowers and the care packages. I have thought about sending them all of the id #'s of the ones sitting in my box. LOL

I have stoped using the app page all together. I have no idea if I am missing gifts but its too much inconvience. Some people don't even have an inbox right now due to glitches so I'm not sure what Zynga expects those players to do.

It wouldn't be so bad if the requests were removed from the app page once collected in game, but I have also noticed that even some of my new gifts are going straight into the game even though I have not collected them in game. Its getting really frustrating.

You probably wouldn't because once you start playing the game every time you enter it the gifts pop  up first so you accept them, and it gets very confusing to remember which you accepted and didn't accept so when you go back to the FB page some get accepted and some send you into the game stopping the acceptance routine which is a pain.  I am sure they made it this way so all gifts would be accepted in game

Unfortunately, this Z forum thread is basically covering up for Zynga bugs using Facebook game request mechanism.

The most glaring example: if you invite a non-PT player to play PT, they would naturally have to go through the "Apps and Games" page to accept your request. They can't possibly know how to go "in game" since they aren't even playing the game! 

So, it's natural for the non-player to start using the "Apps and Games" page to accept requests. And once you do that, wouldn't you just continue using the "Apps and Games" page?