So, it's unavoidable? If again I understand correctly, with this document where unlike my other documents I only put one report per page, I could get away with removing this field? But doing so now tries to squeeze multiple reports on a page and they end up broken, now.

And (thinking this should maybe be a new post) I have a field in the footer of all my mail merge documents ... Page {PAGE} of {NUMPAGES} . It doesn't want to populate. I've deleted it, and rebuilt it, copied it to text then again converted to fields with the same results. Thoughts?

Presumably you still have an empty last record in the data source for the purposes of the directory/catalog merges. In that case, the empty last page is unavoidable unless you specify the range of records to merge via the Finish & Merge dialogue.
The only way I can see that happening is if you also changed the merge type back from a letter merge to a directory/catalog merge. The downside to that, of course, is that you then can't have mergefields in the header/footer.

Conversely, with a directory/catalog merge, one could ensure there was only a page/Section break between records. If you change back to a directory/catalog merge and edit the field code in which the table is embedded by inserting:
{IF{MERGESEQ}> 1 {QUOTE 12}}
after:
{ if{ MERGEFIELD "trn_ui1" }> 4 "
thus:
{ if{ MERGEFIELD "trn_ui1" }> 4 "{IF{MERGESEQ}> 1 {QUOTE 12}}
you'll get page breaks between records and no empty page at the end.

It works for me, regardless of whether one uses a directory/catalog merge or a letter merge.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]