Footnotes and linespacing

Hi,

I'm writing an academic text with footnotes, and I need to stop Word from
inserting too much space between the body text and the footnotes. Word keeps
breaking the pages too early, and there are ugly blank spaces between the
body text and the footnote separator line. My publisher wants me to get rid
of them.

I get situations where there is more than 1 cm space between the body text
and the beginning of the footnotes themselves. This should be plenty of
space for the separator line plus one additional line of text. (My settings
a Bodytext TNR 10pt, spacing exactly 12pt; Footnotes TNR 9 pt, spacing
exactly 11pt; Normal style TNR 10pt, single spaced. The separator line
itself is manually edited and has been set to a line height of 9pt; same for
the the footnote continuation line; the footnote continuation notice is
empty and has been set to the minimum line height of 0.7 pt because I
figured out it was in the way somehow.)

When typing, I can sometimes trick Word into beginning a new paragraph in
the empty space above the footnotes, which shows that there is indeed plenty
of space there. But after a few seconds, Word changes its mind and breaks
the page, putting the new line on the next page.

I've made sure this is certainly not a widow/orphan control thing, or a
matter of having to fit footnotes on one page or the other or of having to
break footnotes across two pages.

I've seen documents where body text continues up to exactly above the
footnote separation line, leaving just as much space for it as the
formatting of the separation line requires, so I know it must be possible.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Lukas