Hi Gary,
Two things:
You're using .NET 2003. This is something antiquated and you should upgrade to newer Visual Studio environment. Probably has nothing to do with the problem but there are major optimizations/improvements in VS 2005, 2008, 2010, 2012. Plus in the .NET environment you'll want to use the native ASE ADO.NET Provider. I suggest using the 4.0 Provider with at lease VS 2008. At least keep this in mind for the near term future.
Secondly, the Provider is very old. We're currently at the 15.7 level. Maybe you only have license to use 15.0, that I don't know. I am not sure why you're hitting the problem. We don't know what types of calls are made at the TDS (Tabular Data Stream) level - the native protocol between Sybase ASE server and it's clients. Maybe you're calling as RPC (stored procedure) instead of Language and possibily some messages are interpretted as error resulting in E_FAIL. The OLEDB API is difficult at times to receive details in the message. I don't knwo how you catch the Exceptions. If possible you need to upgrade the provider.
Another thing is to run on the ASE:
select @@version
and
sp_version. This last one is of interest - it returns the version of the metadata stored procedures installed on ASE and maybe this has something to do with the issue. At this point, if you can't resolve this it might be best to open a Technical Support case with SAP to apply more diagnostics, etc to the problem.
Cheers,
-Paul