I meant field length. My bad.
I tried the join field tool and it gave me a similar result.
We don't have an option of an earlier 10.x machine. We're a small shop (two users) and we just upgraded everyone to 10.3.
A thousand may have been an exaggeration, but I would say I've done it quite a bit. When I was involved in the County I work for's parcel publication process this is how we published our parcels on a monthly basis - joined based off of parcel ID, and exported the join to get the final product. I do not remember it being this difficult before.
Tech support is an option, I just started here to see if 1) Anyone else had had this problem or 2) Maybe I could avoid tech support.
Thanks,
Kevin