'SQLNCLI' Supplied Inconsistent Metadata

I am running a SQL2K on a Server2K box. I have linked servers to SQL2005 Express on WinXP. I am trying to get data off of the SQL2005 DB to the central DB on SQL2K. This has been running for about a year. I am now getting an error message as follows:

Server: Msg 7356, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
OLE DB provider 'SQLNCLI' supplied inconsistent metadata for a column. Metadata information was changed at execution time.
OLE DB error trace [Non-interface error: Column 'TestVarChar' (compile-time ordinal 2) of object '"WKS"."DBo"."testtable"' was reported to have changed. The exact nature of the change is unknown].

When I run the following Queries on the SQL2K box:
SELECT * from WKSA400.WKS.DBo.testtable

or

SELECT * from OPENQUERY(WKSA400, 'SELECT * from WKS.DBO.testtable')

I did notice that if my testtable has only numeric fields, it works fine. It only has a problem with alphanumeric fields.

If I run 'exec sp_tables_ex WKSA400' on the SQL2K, it works fine. I get a listing of all the tables on the remote server. This tells me that my security is fine. It seems to be a conversion from the 2005 to 2000 SQL. If it had not been working for over a year, the dent in the wall the size of my head would be much smaller.