Jamie,
We knew this one was going to cause some folks troubles. On the one hand, the fact that we suppressed blank reports was the single largest cause of support calls to us. It seems a lot of folks write reports where the main report is just a "container" and all of the subreports are where the real data is at. Our suppress blank routine would cause these to never fire off.
So anyway, long story short, we figured it would be better to always output and avoid these confusions but were aware this might inconvienience users that utilize this feature legitimately. But our aim has always been to never take features away from the free users and only add features to Pro; I can see in this circumstance that we need to enable this field for free users. I am going to put in a request for the developers to enable this feature for free users and we will put a new release up shortly. In the meanwhile it might be best to downgrade to 1.6 if you've not done so already.
-Adam