New Page Before is not available for the Report Header and New Page After is not available for the Report Footer. Even though they look like they're checked, they're not doing anything.
If you're getting blank pages, I suspect that what you have in your header and footer is just slightly too long for a page. If you have blank space at the top of the header and at the end of the footer and "Keep Object Together" turned on for the data objects/subreports/whatever, this can happen.
-Dell