Hi Darryl,
We have not seen this issue before. I'm wondering if it isn't a service pack or something. Can you check and see if rolling back a recent SharePoint service pack doesn't resolve it? I know that sounds really bad, but we've seen service packs break things before.
Another idea: if you are not changing the main data source of the form, you can disable auto-update from within the InfoPath Designer.
Hope this helps a wee bit,