Hi Tony,
I installed CR XI R2 and the data file works fine in that version so I am considering this to be a regression issue and I'll track it for DEV to fix, if they can. Due to changes in various OS's and dependencies it may be one of those updates that can't be fixed...
I suspect there should be a registry key that should make this work, I just don't know of one at this time but I'll keep looking.
I'll update the post once I hear back from DEV.
Also, to explain what I believe is happening is the data is being interpreted in UNICODE which is why we see Chinese characters in the error message.
What we need to do is turn off UNICODE in the CR DB Driver somehow I believe... ODBC returns the first character of each row because it's likely padding the uncode with a leading zero.
Don
Case - Incident 275154 / 2016 / DBase memo fields error