I have also found that putting the image in a <div> (with zero margin, set in CSS) rather than a <p> helps prevent blank pages.[/QUOTE]
Just wanted to say thank you for your post. For the last two days I've been racking my head, going through every tag, file, settings I could think of while working in Sigil to try and remove a couple stinking blank pages that appeared before and after the cover image/page. I was opening up every ePub I could get my hands on w/o DRM installed so that I could try and find some big mistake I had made. I completely missed, nor would I have even thought, the <p> tags would have been an issue. I changed to <div> and made some tweaks to style.css and Halleluyah, bye bye blank pages. Thanks again.