It may be that your registry is set to 0, and the other machine is set to 16 or less. The fix may be to change the registry.

I misread the last link I provided. I thought it was saying that 0 tests all rows, and takes the majority. I now believe I was wrong. I now believe that if set to 0, it tests all rows and defines the field type as the longest row found. Meaning that if even one of the rows has more than 255 characters, the whole column is read as memo.

See this link for more details: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/281517