This is my Scenario and my solution with no core mods or hacks.
Scenario
- I am a UK shop
- i have set up 7 zones for my courier
- i do not have free shipping
- i am getting the free shipping issue
- when i set up my shop i said it was in the UK.
- The UK country is located in the Europe Zone.
- I am not using the Europe Zone and i do not have any carriers set up for this zone.
- The Europe Zone is disabled
- I have a carrier with price ranges setup for the 7 Zones i created.
- I have states setup for the UK (actually called counties here but this is for reference)
How to Fix
- go to the countries list
- edit your default country (the country you set prestashop up with), mine is the United Kingdom
- change the zone to that of the one with the correct shipping rules/ranges you want. For me it is City Link Zone 1(carrier prices for mainland UK.)
- The default shipping rule for the shop will now use that of the new Zone you have just selected.
The reason for the free shipping poping up is that basically because there are no carriers and shipping ranges setup for the Europe zone the Prestashop's logic defaults to 'Free Shipping' because that is the out of range behaviour that it can apply.
someone mentioned earlier in the thread that if this was such a big bug, the prestashop Team would of squashed it by now. So just to confirm this is not a bug, perhaps not the most obvious way of changing this, especially with the labelling of it when you edit the country details. Why would you know this affected the default shipping behaviour.
A lot of people mentioned about the default country but never followed through with all of my steps which definately fixes it.
I hope this helps, like this post if it does.