Anyone else always having to go to the end and shorten timeline?

Paul - a couple of things come to mind, though I'm not sure if they apply to you. For example, if you have an object on one slide that has a fixed time length of 85 seconds and you copy that item to other slides, it will (potentially) stretch those timelines to 85 seconds. Not sure if you did this, but it can happen if you have a standard part of the page you choose to put ON the page instead of in the master.

There is also a bug in Version 7. If you have an object aligned to a cue point, and you use the "align to cue point" capability to realign the object to an EARLIER cue point, Storyline ADDs the time difference to the end of the timeline. So if you have a 20 second timeline, and you realign an object that currently begins the 10-second mark to a cue point at the 6-second mark, you are moving it BACK in time 4 seconds, so Storyline arbitrarily adds 4 seconds to the timeline (your new timeline will be 24 seconds with 4 seconds of "dead-air" at the end). This bug gets ugly if you realign multiple items. I once realigned 42 items to a point 18 seconds earlier in the timeline and Storyline added 42 x 18 = 756 seconds to the timeline. Pain in the backside! They know about it and, hopefully, it will be fixed in the next release.