Hilary; not sure I fully catch your drift - would you mind uploading a modified version of the template? I greatly appreciate your help.
I tried creating another group under the root and then moved the "Primary_Repeater" group into it, but it didn't seem to make a difference. I may not have understood your instructions. Also, if I modify the node structure too heavily it no longer loads the sample data. I have production forms that have this problem (yikes!!) and I can't risk losing the data. Clearly poor design oversight on my behalf... but I'm not sure I should have even gotten to this point with InfoPath. Active Server Pages next time most likely...