While avant-garde when initialy introduced with ArcView 1.0, shapefiles have not aged well.
They are limited by dBase naming restrictions, poor date support, inability to store numeric
NULLs, and a lack of international character support. I'd recommend using ASCII as a transfer
mechanism, but I've systematically stripped pre-9.x support from 'se_toolkit' over the past year
(8.3 was retired in Sept 2008).
Would waiting for 10.x clients help motivate your organization to begin an ArcSDE upgrade
process? A lack of overlap between modern computers and the software products available
when 8.3 was released (which are all now unsupported by their manufacturers) is going to
increase the upgrade difficulty (as will the inability of anything but 10.0 ArcGIS clients to read
10.0 geodatabases).
It's normally recommended to upgrade the clients first, but across the chasm of 8.3->10.0,
you probably need to upgrade your 8.3 ArcSDE to 9.3.1sp2, then upgrade the desktops,
and then upgrade the server again to 10.x.
- V
