Have you tried clearing the system font caches?

I haven't, where are they located? I know how to find the adobe font cache.

Ascender has some good info about this on their support FAQ:

http://www.ascendercorp.com/support/#cache

I use the FontExplorer X, which has a utility built in for clearing font caches.

I actually try to avoid clearing font caches as much as I can since it requires a restart every time. When I have a font under development, I change the font name with each new version I want to test. This sidesteps the cache issue since the system sees different names and assumes they are different fonts (which, if you think about it, they are).

Open the generated fonts (not the .vfbs) in FontLab Studio and make screenshots of Font Info / Metrics and Dimensions / TrueType-specific metrics. Upload the screenshots here.

I've seen both extra vertical space and negative vertical space (lines squish together or display as half height) in fonts generated by FontLab where the ascender is lower than the cap height.

The way I see it, if the ascenderr line is lower than the cap height, the ascender line really serves no purpose, other than as a guide while editing/creating a font. Once you're done with the font you can ignore the actual ascender height and set the line a couple of em spaces higher than the cap height and that seems to usually fix the problem you're seeing.

At least that's been my experience.

I solved the problem. The Aring was sticking over the ascender line about 20 points. I'm still not sure why that happened. Shouldn't it be ok to have the accents above the ascender line?

Shouldn’t it be ok to have the accents above the ascender line?

Yes, of course, where should they else be? :)

You have to take a look at ALL your vertical metrics, if you do as Adam suggests, you'll get good help.