Cannot force Page Breaks to be calculate

I have code to automate pagination. It's quick and easy, but it Page breaks must be calculated by Excel before it will work. This used to be possible using ActiveWindow.View = xlPageBreakPreview : DoEvents . In the latest version this fails. It feels as though the "optimization" of the screen refresh has killed it. What now happens is that Excel waits until the worksheet is ready for user input and only then triggers a RePaint which will then (if we're in page break preview mode) calculate the page breaks for the sheet. In other words, it cannot be automated. If you make page breaks at an earlier point in the process, then the Repaint will destroy them (because it thinks page breaks have never been calculated). It is not acceptable for me to require users to make manual changes and manually update the page breaks in an automatically generated report. Easiest solution would be to know how to override the optimization and force a page break calculation. Failing that, I could paginate by code but would need to know how to tell Excel that the sheet has had page breaks calculated already.

Screen updating doesn't help. I have tried keeping it at True. I have also tried starting off with a non-blank sheet which has been created manually and has page breaks calculated and is in page break preview mode, then overwriting the data on it using macros. At some point Excel decides that the sheet has never had pages calculated and destroys all hard page breaks (which were correctly set, because I have a call to Sleep inserted so that I can see what's going on without coming into debug mode and making it work because of the manual intervention).

Code now reads
Application.ScreenUpdating = True: DoEvents
ActiveWindow.View = xlPageBreakPreview ' or page breaks don't recalculate
Application.ScreenUpdating = True
DoEvents
but it makes no difference. Pagebreaks become valid only when the sheet is waiting for input

I have also wondered if it might be due to multi-threading (my repaginating code running in one thread while Excel is trying to calculate the page breaks), but inserting
Application.MultiThreadedCalculation.Enabled = false
before all the above code doesn't help either.