I had a customer call me recently about this error. Usually this error is quick to resolve.  It is almost always caused by a an object that “Can Grow” (e.g. subreport, memo field) in the Page Header. The customer sent the report to me with saved data and it opened fine on my PC. Both sections were empty and both sections were also suppressed. That made no sense to me. I assumed they had sent me a different report by mistake.

So we did a remote session and I confirmed it was the same report. When it opened on their PC the error appeared. After some poking around I went into “Page Setup” to check the page size and noticed that the bottom margin was set to 11 inches. The error message about the PH/PF turned out to be a red herring. The real issue was a combination of the margin setting and the selected printer. Once we entered a reasonable margin setting, the report behaved normally in their environment.

So if you get this error and can’t find anything that would cause it, you have one more place to check.