What changed? If you haven't made any changes to your IPPlan installation or configuration then it seems you're looking in the wrong place to solve the problem. Per the error report you posted, the "login failed" is most telling. Has the password been changed in your configuration for IPPlan or on the server? Start looking there.
The backslash is an escape character, so if you want to have an actual backslash in the description then you need to use two... as in '\\'.
The backslash is an escape character, so if you want to have an actual backslash in the description then you need to use '\'.
The forward slash is an escape character, so if you want to have an actual forward slash in the description then you need to use '\'.