How to remove a blank page "before" the title page

For what it's worth or if all else fails, you can always remove the first page by adding the following to your document preamble:

\usepackage{atbegshi}% http://ctan.org/pkg/atbegshi
\AtBeginDocument{\AtBeginShipoutNext{\AtBeginShipoutDiscard}}

This should affect only the next shipout at the document start, which defaults to the first page.

Instead of chucking out the problem page, you should avoid generating it in the first place.

You're getting an extra page because something is producing output before \maketitle. You can even see the output: .0, as you report. So, my guess is that somewhere in your header you're assigning a decimal number to a counter that only accepts integers: E.g., 10.0 instead of just 10. The leftovers are treated as text, and printed on the first page. Examine your compilation messages (or .log file if necessary), and you should be able to spot the error. (If the error is ahead of \begin{document}, you'll get a very obvious complaint about that.)

If you have no such assignment in your preamble, then it's hidden in one of the packages you include. How could this happen? Most likely, one package redefines a command that another package then (mis)uses. A bit of experimenting should discover the two culprits. You can often avoid such problems by simply reversing their order of inclusion.

I just discovered the following. Two blank pages before the title were generated when I tried to put blank lines (\ \\) between \author{} and \date{} commands. Namely, the following code generated the extra blank pages:

\title{title}

\author{name}
\ \\
\ \\
\date{year}

\maketitle

and this one did not:

\title{title}

\author{name}
\date{year}

\maketitle