Crystal Reports 8.5 with Oracle 9i

Is anyone out there running/maintaing Crystal Reports 8.5 reports off of stored procedures that are hitting an Oracle 9i DB? I have been told that this combination just isn't going to work, but want to make sure that that is the case prior to giving up on it.

   Specific setup:

                       Designer: Crystal Reports 8.5
                       Web manager: Crystal Enterprise 8.5
                       Database:  Oracle 9i

   In particular, I get a consistent "Invalid string or buffer length" error message every time that I try to tie a stored procedure to a report. I have been told that the drivers associated with Crystal (and it appears the Microsoft and Oracle drivers that come with Crystal) will not support this operation. Would using the latest Oracle ODBC driver fix this problem? Any other suggestions? Thanks for your time-

                                                             Adam