Hey Phil, you're right. This is much ado about nothing.

My mistake was trying to directly change the connection string in the properties window of an existing connection. Knowing that the Sql Server 2012 native client provider was SQLNCL11, I change the provider there as well as the server name for the Sql Server 2012. That's when I got the invalid provider message.

I did this because, when I tried to make the change at the connection manager, it couldn't find the name of the Sql Server 2012 server in the server list.

I found out later the server had been taken down for some reason. So, this morning, I tried to make the connection again by changing the name to the Sql Server 2012 server. Voila. It worked. I was able to make the connection.

I haven't run the package yet but I did test the connection and there were no problems there.

If you hadn't questioned why I did what I did and why I needed to do it, I probably would have figured that was the only route available to me. So thanks.