The "immediate cause" is that this looks like the conceal flag is set. I don't know how this made it into the entry. We found a serious bug in the IBM C compiler and for half a day American ran with the buggy version. The bug caused LISTSERV to think that all events on earth occurred on Oct 28, 1900. That is, a central date conversion routine always returned this result when compiled with optimization. We immediately recompiled without optimization and sent American a fix. Other routines might have been affected. IBM sent us a fix which did not solve anything and we're still talking to them. We're probably going to switch to gcc if they don't fix this problerm soon. Eric