Although this sounds like it's really an issue in CR4E itself, I would also have someone take a look at the connection in the Universe Designer and/or the ODBC administrator on the server and see which version of the SQL Server database driver it's using. If you're on a version of MS SQL that's newer than 2005 and it's just plain "SQL Server" instead of "SQL Server Native Client 10.0", it may be that there's a conflict with the database client that's causing this.
-Dell