SSRS Issues With 32bit And 64bit ODBC Drivers

The ultimate goal is for users to be able to run a report that looks pretty and grabs current information from our database. We'd like to use SQL Report Builder since we're already

Solution 1:

You may be hitting an old but recurring issue with minor corruption in the Windows Registry.

The corruption takes the form of entries containing this 4-character string —

@=""  

These entries aren't visible anywhere except Registry export files — the Registry Editor ignores them completely — but they can lead to a number of undesired behaviors, including the error you report.

NOTE: On your 64-bit Windows machine, there are naturally some complications tied to the 32-bit Registry. This Microsoft KB article may be sufficient to get you through these.

I suggest that you use the 64-bit Registry Editor (%systemroot%\system32\regedit) to export the following branches (where these problematic entries tend to be found) —

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\ODBC
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ODBC
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\WOW6432Node\ODBC
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\WOW6432Node\ODBC

Edit these files in any text editor (Notepad or Wordpad are generally fine), and delete all lines which consist of that 4-character string, above. Then, delete the Registry tree segment(s) you exported, and import from the edited files — thereby restoring the tree segment(s), minus the corruption.

It won't hurt to repeat the above process with the 32-bit Registry Editor (%systemroot%\syswow64\regedit), but as you've described the issue, I don't think you'll find any @="" in the 32-bit export.