Yeah... good one Angi! For some reason I assumed that global was the time the report took to execute...  pays to experiment!

Solved, I obviously didn't search the forums thoroughly enough! The solution to this problem can be found in the following thread:

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/forums/shwmessage.aspx?forumid=150&messageid=196019#bm197039

PS My solution so far has been to put a 1-line VB function called "TodaysDate()" which returns Date.Now, and link a textbox to it.