  Frictional drag measurements revealing anomalously large dissipation at the
transition between the weakly- and strongly-coupled regimes of a bilayer
two-dimensional electron system at total Landau level filling factor $\nu_T =1$
are reported. This result suggests the existence of fluctuations, either static
or dynamic, near the phase boundary separating the quantized Hall state at
small layer separations from the compressible state at larger separations.
Interestingly, the anomalies in drag seem to persist to larger layer
separations than does interlayer phase coherence as detected in tunneling.
