I'm using VM on Studio 2015.  I'm trying to load a helpfile into Flash since it's fairly large and there isn't alot of SRAM around.  I define an array of strings:

const String  PROGMEM    longstringtable[]  = {
     "RS232 and Telnet Commands Include:|",
.
.
.
     "--------------------------------|"
}

The text is around 3k.  When I compile and execute the code, I have around 25K free, yet commenting this line out it climbs up to 28K free.  Right now, there are no references to the variable in the code which would pull it in.  Looking through the Arduino forums they mention an old bug in the GCC tools around PROGMEM not actually having the compiler place the data in the right segment.  Their suggestion:

const dataType variableName[] PROGMEM = {};   // use this form
const PROGMEM  dataType  variableName[] = {}; // or this form
const dataType PROGMEM variableName[] = {};   // not this one

But none have worked for me - regardless of structure of the declaration I get the 3K SRAM taken up.

Anyone have any ideas?  I can read this from FRAM over I2C but it's clunky and I have the flash to spare.

Thanks