Do you have a url where I can view the error?
Validation toolkit offers advantages over DW validation mostly with its Server Validation. Spry is in fact more full featured than our client validation which is why we have started using spry in place of validation toolkit for client validations in our solutions.
Client validations can be used in conjunction with the DW spry validations and server validations can be applied on top since client validation is really not secure at all since all anyone has to do is turn off javascript to get passed it. That is the functionality that Validation Toolkit offers that is superior to what DW supplies.
Our validation is also more flexible in a lot of ways and can be used in conjunction with spry to help reformat, do contitional validation, or more specific validations that spry may not support, but that is a more advanced concept than I want to go into here.