Exporting to Excel - Unicode Issue

[ens]

I think I am just looking for help to debug my situation.  I have two SQL Queries pulling in Project and Employee Data.  One has two fields and the other has 10.  I then add 8 blank fields to the first Query so my fields are even and then do a Union.  The Union works via HTML, but as soon as I export it to Excel, I get a RQP-DEF-0177 error.  Both Querys that make up the Union I can export to Excel without issue. 

I have done all of the stupid things (I think) to fix this....  I have CAST([Data Item],VARCHAR (20)) each item.  I have played with the content of the blank, bogus fields in the first query.
''
'Delete'
CAST ('',VARCHAR(20))
CAST ('Delete',VARCHAR)

Any other ideas of what I can try to get past this error?

And yes, I have looked at the error message in a number of forums and I get a bunch of different results that don't seem to be the issue.