the only thing that comes to mind is if the field that you are grouping on is in the dataTable that you are setting the subreport to....or if the name is changed in your dataTable that is pushed to the report vs the one that the report was designed against.
As I am sure you know, since you are pushing the data, vs pulling the data back from the database it is harder to keep the fields in sync. A verify database command may return OK, but it may be against old test data and not the latest schema (which is your live data)...so I guess that is where I would start, making sure that the schemas match.
HTH