The ways of Microsoft controls can be interesting indeed. At one point, we had to reverse-sort phone numbers to be loaded into a VARCHAR column in SQL Server. The vendor used a Microsoft control, which would look at a couple of phone numbers, say 2025551212, conclude that they were suitable for 32-bit integers, and choke somewhere around the 404 area code.
Then there was the time another package tried to write out street addresses that were something like 3E123 or maybe it was E456. Apparently the control read them as numbers in scientific format that were just way too big.