pyodbc >2.1.7 & python 32 bit issues

[israel]

Sorry to ask about such an ancient release, but I am being unable to
get any pyodbc release newer than 2.1.7 to work for me on MAC OS X
10.8.3. My gut feeling on the matter is that it is due to having to
run python in 32 bit mode for compatibility with the ODBC driver I
have to use (4th dimension), but I would like a second opinion. The
problem is as follows:

I have a fairly simple select statement that I run as so:
fmCursor.execute("""SELECT <VariousColumns> FROM <TableName> WHERE
<date_Col>=? AND <varchar_col> = ? ORDER BY <sortCol>""",
(parser.parse(date), <stringValue>.encode("utf-8")) )

When running this on Mac OS X 10.8.3, Python 2.7 running in 32 bit
mode, pyodb 2.1.7, the query runs perfectly and returns the expected
data. However, whenever I upgrade to the newest release of pyodbc, or,
in fact, anything newer than 2.1.7, I get no results, even for the
exact same parameters that returned results with pyodbc 2.1.7. Did the
64 bit and unicode changes in 2.1.8 break things when running python
in 32 bit mode? Or is there some way I can fix this so I can use the
latest version? Thanks.