Curious Date Issue

Hello all, hoping someone can give me some direction.

Here is my problem: My App has a variety of customizable user fields. They are defined in one table as various datatypes. However, when data is input to various other tables in the SQL DB, they are stored as strings. I have ben told this will never change, as an end user is free to change the datatype at any given time, and the data needs to be accommodated without blowing up in other tables.

I have an international client, who uses a date format different than what we use locally. The Custom Date field they are using inputs the data as xx/xx/xxxx in varchar format. They use dd/mm/yyyy. We use mm/dd/yyyy.

In the database the string represents whatever was typed. So in their db it legitimately shows dd/mm/yyyy.

However, in Crystal 2008, when this string is pulled in, for the first 12 days of the year, Crystal transposes the numbers and changes it to dd/mm/yyyy, regardless of how the raw data comes in.

So if they have 2 different dates coming in and one is 31/08/2012 and the other 07/12/2012, the first date will display as it was typed - 31/08/2012, but the second will display as 12/07/2012.

I know I can bypass it by reformatting in some complicated way, but is there some Crystal issue or setting that I need to correct to resolve the root cause?