>Doru,
>
>As documented in VFP help, "Visual FoxPro performs two passes through the report" to get the number of pages in it (_pagetotal). It doesn't do that if _pagetotal doesn't appears anywhere in report. See '_PAGETOTAL System Variable' in help for details.
>

Thanks Sergey,
I did read the VFP help, and found it clear as mud...
It seemed to say what you say (which made me test adding a field and a variable), but I was hopping I didn't understand. Too bad I was wrong, it makes _pagetotal almost useless for us, I don't see us changing all the reports and going from coding to hardcoding.
To tell the truth, I still hope someone will come with some clever idea...