I think I found out why this happened.. I had set the figure float's placement (not paragraph placement) to "Use default placement" and this put the figure on the top of the next page. And the section came right below the figure so it looks like LyX/Latex was trying to fill that column (the paper is in 2-column format) with the paras in that section and hence decided to put extra lines between the paras.. everything is fine when I change the placement to "Here definitely". Is this how the default placement is supposed to behave? Why is it trying to fill up the column with that section?
Thanks, nirmal
