My experience has been that when this occurs, what usually happens is that there is a blank line outside of the section between it and the next section. So when the section is gone, the blank line is still visible... the more sections that are hidden, the more blank lines that come together.
To work around this, put the blank line inside the section, or eliminate it all together and put a 1.2em bottom margin on the section itself.

Signature
Greg Collins [InfoPath MVP]
Please visit: http://www.InfoPathDev.com
I'm building a form of checklist actions where certain actions will only be
visible based on earlier decisions. The problem I've got, though, is that
when I hide a section that contains some fields, the hidden section is still
taking up space.
If there are bunch of these hidden sections, it leaves a big white space gap
in my form. I've tried setting the various size values to zero but it isn't
having any effect.
Have I approached this the wrong way, or is there a secret way to improve
the layout?
--Philip