One might feel inclined to ignore the "optional feature not implemented" message.
The "function sequence error" indicates a bug in the application, in that it calls ODBC functions in an illegal order.
Now, why does this only happen sometimes on some computers? Just a few thoughts (not quite at random, as I have done some ODBC programming):
(1) at different times and/or on different machines an application that's trying to be too clever for its own good might end up doing different things with stuff like internal caching and thread handling, and only get it wrong sometimes (because it sometimes takes different paths through the code even when the end user thinks he's running the same query)
(2) I get the impression that some bridge products have bugs in them which can cause this, even if the application programmer thought she'd done the right thing; this could be the explanation if the application is not written in something like C++ and calling the ODBC driver manager directly.