As odd is this may be - here is what ended up being the solution. Turns out that the ODBC driver I was using may have been the issue all along. The System driver, rather than the Crystal driver was being used. When we switched it to the Crystal driver - it seems to have resolved itself. Second, we have a legacy program called uSQL which was not installed on my machine - installation fixed the issues connection to the second database.
It seems to have resolved - so thanks for the input all of you!