Bill,

>When I use the SUMMARY option, it still prints a 1 point blank line, in the space where the detail band would be, for every record in the data source.
>I don't remember why I used an external flag for printing the detail band, but I don't think that should make any difference to my problem.

Well it's not the exact same thing. Try creating a new report, just make it a Quick report using the column layout format. create a report variable to sum one of the numeric columns, put a field in the report footer to output the report variable. Then run REPORT ... SUMMARY and see if it has the problem.