Phil and Nevyn, thanks for reply.

With your vote behind mine, that this is non-logical behavior, I set up setting up bare bones package to deal with just the ingestion of two different versions of the source files. Set the datatypes inside the flat file connection manager. Then switched the connection manager to another version of the source file, having slightly different default datatypes for the same column. Yet, both worked as they should.

It was a good baseline from which to move forward with sense that it's got to be something else....and it was. In the real life example I have a master package that calls out child dtsx packages. Having worked on this project, I had two different folders with multiple copies of the child dtsx package and it turns out that my master package was pointed to different child dtsx packages then the ones I thought I was troubleshooting.

The appearance of datatypes being reset was actually just me getting errors for the child packages that were not the same ones as I was editing in response to those errors.

Ick. Glad you asked for sample.