I had an interesting issue a couple of months ago while creating an SSRS report. I developed my report in BIDS, built it, and previewed it just fine. I was also able to deploy it to my RS server just fine, but when I viewed the report from the browser I got a cryptic error about the report not being able to be rendered. I started digging around and somewhere during the course of my research it dawned on me that this was a new SQL 2008 R2 server and I was probably still running BIDS 2008 RTM on my laptop.
I went ahead and upgraded BIDS to 2008 R2 and opened the report. As expected, BIDS recognized that this was an older version report and offered to update the report. I went ahead and updated the report, built it again, and re-deployed. Of course anytime you do this you want to make sure your settings allow for everything to be overwritten, which I did. The deployment went fine, but I continued to get the exact same error when viewed through the browser. I never figured out why I was still getting the error, and it annoys me to this day.
Fortunately the report was a simple one, so I blew it away and re-created it from scratch. This time it worked without a hitch, and no rendering issues. My advice is to always develop your reports in the same version of BIDS that your RS server is running.
I have had reports update just fine through BIDS before so I’m not sure what it was about this particular report that did not like that process.