Text as LongVarChar ?

Ok, I've finally had my run in with 'Text as LongVarChar'. Actually, I
did months ago and wrote it off as strange Access behavior. What happens
is I open a recordset (ODBCDirect w/ dbExecDirect option) and the text
fields from the query are only good for one read. This one read include
everything, such as watches and those little popups in the code view.
For example, the control that is normally populated from this recordset
will come up empty if you have a watch on 'rst!textfield', because the
watch reads the recordset first. This only happens with the text fields.
The other numeric fields from the same rst work fine. Now, surprise, I
unchecked 'Text as LongVarChar' and these text fields behave just like the
others. The strange thing is that if you open the recordset with the
dbOpenSnapshot option, it works, regardless of 'Text as LongVarChar'. Can
someone explain this? Is it actually Access strangeness?

(After writing this I looked and found that I have driver version
7.01.0003)..

-Cedar