>The stretchable fields are in the detail band. the break is also occuring on the detail band, which pushes the summary band to a third page (it is set to start on a new page) I don't so much mind that it goes to three pages, but it is ugly with 1/2 the front of the first page being blank, when to the eye it is visually obvious the rest of the stretchable fields (or more) are able to fit.

To take the other approach, then, have you tried setting "constant band height" for the detail band? I have experienced some wierd situations involving page overflow in a detail band: in one case, a detail band overflowed to a second page and the report dropped a detail line in the process! The fix was to set "constant band height" on, which worked but had other repercussions. In that particular case, I eventually abandoned the report writer and created the report in code.