InDesign Data Merge Issues...

Hey all, I'm relatively new to using InDesign, I've used it previously for basic artwork layouts etc, and I'm familiar with Illustrator and Photoshop, but InDesign is something I'm still getting to grips with.
I run a mailing company and we have an ongoing requirement for variable data merging. Software designed for variable data work when dealing with PDFs and high res images is incredibly expensive, and so I figured I could try and make use of InDesign's own data merging feature.
Now I'm fully aware of some of the irritating little issues surrounding this tool, such as the way if you've got two blank fields it only removes one of them, and I also know it used to have an issue where it would pull data through from the next record to replace blanks, but I don't see that happening any more.
There are lots of webpages and forums discussing the blank fields problem, but my problem is currently something else.
I've noticed that some of the fields often don't like to display anything other than the header row, the field name.  You drop the field onto the page and create your merge, but when you preview it or publish it whilst most of the fields do as expected and change to show the data, some of the fields do not, they just continue to show <contact> for instance, rather than a name.
I'm at a loss to explain this really, it's not even particularly consistent.
As an example of my problem, I laid out the following address block
<Contact>
<Add1>
<Add2>
<Add3>
<Add4>
<Add5>
<Postcode>
What I get sometimes is this...
<Contact>
123 Sample Street
Sample Town
Sample County
Sample Postcode
Or...
Mr AB Sample
123 Sample Street
Sample Town
<Add3>
Sample Postcode
If you add the same field again beneath the one that is playing up, the new field will work, but the one beneath it will then play up, so where in the example above it is <Add3> that isn't merging, if I added another <add3> beneath it, I could almost guarantee that <Add4> would then play up.
I just don't understand it, and it's frustrating me immensely.
Ironically I know a local professional printers who are using InDesign for all their digital variable print runs, without issue, so I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. They are using Macs whereas I am using a PC with Windows 7 Ultimate x 64bit, but I've had the same problem on other Windows version, so is it a Windows related problem, or are Mac users just not spotting this??
Anyone who has ever experienced something similar and perhaps found a solution, please help!!!!!
Best Regards
Richard

RikRamsay14 - thank you for your response, the issue regarding blanks isn't really the concern here, I'm aware of this issue, and the remove blank lines works where this is only one blank field, if there's two blank fields then it only seems to remove one. But I can happily work around this by just shifting all my data across. The data source is fine and is not the problem.
Peter Spier - Many thanks for your reply Peter, I thought you might be on to something with this, so I tried opening it from scratch and merging instantly without the use of any previewing, at first I thought it had worked, but when I got further down the merge results I spotted the same problem, field headers appearing where content should be.  These instances are not even where the data cell is blank, it just decides not to display the content, but to display the field header instead, it's inconsistent too so it's really hard to analyse to find a pattern.
My layout incorporates multiple text placeholders containing multiple variable fields.  I am starting to wonder if this could be contributing to the fault. I have tried just creating one text placeholder, and then using the multiple record layout option to display the other three images (it's a postcard four-up on an SRA3 sized page, with four address blocks).  This seems to be less buggy this way, but I have less control with the layout. I'm going to continue to test this theory today, but it could simply be that it can't cope with multiple variable address blocks.
Thanks for all your help guys.
Regards
Richard

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