I ahve run into the same problem. The total of the header, detail, and footer bands could not exceed the height of the physical page, in my case 8.5 inches. The way that I solved the problem is that ALL fields in the detail band have the "float" attribute set on. This includes all of the text(label) fields which are in fields and not typed on the actual report form. The field for the text(labels) need on setup as follows:
In the field name instead of keying a variable or property name, simply key in the actual value. For example, "Text label".