thanks for that... I will expand the range and see if that works. That thought hadn't occurred to me.

On other routers which have static DCHP functions, including Cisco, I have always intentionally setup static DCHP tables using addresses outside of the pool range to insure that addresses intended for static devices would not have been inadvertently handed out already by the DCHP proc.

It may be that I have been using static DHCP functions for uses other than those for which it static DCHP was designed. When I have added a device which I wish to always remain at a specific address, rather than going into that device to tell it to be static (some devices don't have that option even), I have merely added its MAC into the static DHCP table of the router at the address I have chosen. Then when it boots and asks for an address, it is given the address I wish it to have.

Example, I may want all printers in the range of .200-.219, all NAS boxes in the range .230-.239, etc. It would seem that if the free address pool were expanded to encompass those addresses, that DHCP may have already handed out one of my "reserved" address before I added the next "static" device in that group.

If you look at the running/startup config file, those bindings are in the config file and are loaded at startup.  So the IP addresses are bound to the MAC addresses before any address is handed out by the server, so the DHCP server would not have the chance to assign them, they would be reserved from the moment the server is up and running. 

In the Small Business routers, since the DHCP server is still handing out the statically assigned addresses, they have to be part of the assignable pool for the server to give it out.  Hope this makes sense.  Thanks Byron.