Can longtable be made to start halfway down a page?

Question

Aware that old versions of longtable had trouble starting tables halfway down a page I have downloaded the latest longtable.sty, and it's in the same directory as my document; but there is still page break (and an approximately 75% blank page) before my table, which is particularly frustrating since the table runs to just over three pages.

Two questions:

• Can I be sure that putting longtable.sty in the same directory as my document it will be picked up when I \usepackage{longtable} (yes, it turns out this is okay)

• Is there anything I can do to force the table to start as soon as possible?

EDIT: my latex --version is:

pdfTeX using libpoppler 3.141592-1.40.3-2.2 (Web2C 7.5.6)
kpathsea version 3.5.6
...
Compiled with libpng 1.2.26; using libpng 1.2.26
Compiled with zlib 1.2.3; using zlib 1.2.3
Compiled with xpdf version 3.01

Though I can't easily change this as I'm working on a managed system.

EDIT again:
I've uploaded a cut down version of the document that reproduces the problem at:
http://codepad.org/zbCQtRg8 (main file)
http://codepad.org/Xv8lRABi (included file with longtable)

Answer 1

Change your \include{test-data} to \input{test-data} and the table appears right under the section header.

the \include{} command is equivalent to \clearpage \input{file} \clearpage which is why your table didn't start until the next page.

the \input{} command just inserts the content of the file, with no extra non-sense.