Found a solution, although it's not what I really desire:
The extra box shows up when I have both the "show state" and "always displayed as pull-down" box enabled. When I disable the "always displayed as pull-down". leaving just the state field enabled it's fine.
The question is whether this is a one or the other situation as I assumed it was- that you could have either a plain empty box they fill in OR have a pull-down list. However enabling both gives me a pull-down box AND the extra blank box. Enabling only the "always display as pull-down" I get no state/province box at all nor the pull-down list. In other words, at this point I cannot enable a pull-down list because it also gives me the blank, mandatory field, which can't be filled in, hence the page cannot be completed. Seems like this might be a bug.



