Well, yes and no.

Here is one way that does achieve what you want (kinda): If you select the last text frame and cut it (Command-X on a Mac or the menu item Cut). You can immediately paste it back in place (Option-Shift-Command-V on a Mac or the menu item Paste in Place) and it will contain all the text that was originally in it but without the link to the previous text frame. The gotcha is that the previous text frame will now display the little red cross in its out-port indicating that there is overset text. You could, of course, do the same cut-and-replace for each of the other text frames in the series (including the first one) but that seems a tad tedious.

Here is a second way to break a thread that is not so good for your purpose: With the selection tool (black arrow), double-click on either the in-port of a text frame or the out-port of the previous text frame. Unfortunately, this empties the frame following the port you double-clicked and all subsequent frames (although subsequent frames, although now empty, remain linked to each other).

Here is a third way that is also not so good: With the selection tool, click either the out-port or the in-port where you wish to cut the thread. Then, with the cursor loaded (and showing the link icon) click in the text frame immediately up-stream of where you previously clicked. Again, the text frame immediately down-stream of where you cut the thread (and all subsequent text frames) will now be empty and the last filled text frame will show the overset text icon.

Is it possible that one of the “text rows” (by which I assume you mean paragraphs) in the offending cells has a rule in its style, either a rule above or a rule below?

I haven’t yet moved to CS5 (or CS5.5) but in InDesign CS4, if you look in the Book panel’s fly-out menu (top left corner of the panel) the tenth item from the top is “Export Book to PDF”. You don’t even have to have the individual chapter files open, just the book panel itself. When you select the item, the first dialog you see is the “Save” dialog, allowing you to name your .pdf.

Just a thought . . . If chapter 2 is supposed to begin on a right page but chapter 1 ends on a right page, when you print the lot together, chapter 2 will be forced to begin on a left page. If this is the problem, you need to insert a blank page at the end of chapter 1.

Or have I misunderstood you?

There seems to have been a change today. Instead of loading in the left margin, today when I came to this site, in the final stage of loading a page, the content slides down about a centimetre (or maybe a bit less) and the “Tweet, e-mail, Share” buttons appear in the space created just below the ad banner at the top of the page.

I think this looks neater than floating off in the left margin which, depending on how wide the viewer has set their browser window, may well be obscured.

I can recall similar behaviour on CS3 some time ago (I have been using CS4 since it came out in 2008) and at the time I found that restarting my computer seemed to clear the problem. But I have no idea what caused it in the first place. For the record, I am using a Macintosh and I don’t know if restarting has the same cleansing effect on a PC.