[GNC] $0 total balances wrongly appearing on Balance Sheet.

[peterb]

I've encountered a bit of a Scooby Doo mystery, and I'm hoping someone can
help me figure it out.

My Balance Sheet report consistently includes commodity accounts with 0
balance figures for me, even when I've unchecked "Include accounts with
zero total balances."  Trying to reproduce this with a brand-new book for
demo purposes doesn't show this behavior, so I'm left assuming there's
something about my file that is odd.

Specifically, there are two options under "Display" for Balance sheet, to
wit:

• Include accounts with zero total balances
• Omit zero balance figures

I would expect that having the first option UN-checked and the second
option checked would result in my stock accounts with 0 shares in them
appearing; sadly, they're all over the report.

In contrast, the "Balance Sheet using eguile-gnc" report has an option
(under "Accounts", not "Display" this time) of "Exclude accounts with zero
total balances".  Checking this option achieves what I'd consider the right
result - no zero balance values are shown.

After further experimentation, there seems to be an interaction with the
"Levels of Subaccounts" control on the Accounts tab of the report options.
If I increase the levels of subaccounts accordingly, or flatten the list to
the depth limit, the 0 balance figures don't appear - again, only (so far)
in this one file.

So I have two workarounds to the problem (either using the eguile report,
or adjusting the depth limit/flattening options), but I am still concerned
that I don't understand why the behavior is happening in the first place.

My questions are:
(1) Has anyone else seen this behavior?
(2) If so, do you understand what's triggering it?

Thanks,

Peter