"Value does not fall within the expected range" with long CR parameter

Using Crystal Reports for .NET with Visual Studio .NET 2003, I'm passing a string parameter that is sometimes more than 254 characters. When it is, CR fails with the error: "Value does not fall within the expected range"

According to Business Objects Note 1214400, this is a known problem. However, it's not clear to me if there's a fix for the .NET version of CR. If there is, I can't find it on the new SAP download site. I've downloaded crnet10win_en.zip and crnet11win_en.zip, but that doesn't seem to solve the problem (though I'm not entirely sure that they've installed correctly, because the references to CR inside Visual Studio continue to display the original version number of 9.1.5000.0, rather than the updated version numbers from the hotfix packs).

Is there a way to resolve this error with CR for .NET 2003, or do I have to upgrade to a later version to get a fix? Any ideas on an alternate way to pass a parameter of more than 254 characters?