Magento – Paypal Express Checkout without shipping address

I had a NoState plugin installed. After uninstalling it the problem disappeared.

I hate posting answers to my own questions but it seems that as the one who has need of it most pressingly I have gone the distance here.. as is too often the case..

So after trying numerous techniques including:

1) making attributes as not required in the eav attributes table in the database;

2) programatically adding these required fields to the database upon billing update (with event)

The best that I have come up with that works (very well) is to create hidden fields for any fields that are required but not relevant - in my case city, region and postcode - and include them inside the form. The easiest way to do this I believe is to create a function for this in a custom module file like so (changing $inputFields_arr to correspond to the required fields you wish to ignore):

public function getRequiredNotRequestedInputs($prefix) { // fill in input values required but not wanted
    $value = 'NOT REQUESTED';
    $inputFields_arr = array('city', 'region', 'postcode'); // required fields that we don't need/request
    foreach($inputFields_arr as $inputField) {
        $return_arr[] = '<input type="hidden" name="'.$prefix.'['.$inputField.']" id="'.$prefix.':'.$inputField.'" value="'.$value.'" />';
    }
    return implode('',$return_arr);
}

Then call this like this:

<?php echo $moduleFile->getRequiredNotRequestedInputs('billing'); // set city, postcode, etc ?>

..from whatever point you want (where $moduleFile is the file you stored the above function in). In my case I've called this in:

app/design/frontend/default/YOUR-TEMPLATE/template/YOUR-CUSTOM-LAYOUT/checkout/billing.phtml

I know that there are those out there that will want to do this the quick and nasty way (and that is your perogative) by putting the hidden fields directly into a local front-end file (and overriding the core) but after learning to use custom modules with all that you can it will not only help you to update (a well-heard sermon) it will keep things tidy and for me that is more than half the battle. Hope this is helpful to others.