>>Yowsa! Maybe your problem was "crossing midnight" with "t" value (>86400) or was "t" now part of the new day (date+1 t%86400)?
>
>no, it was like your problem looking at the data in VFP it was not obvious that the internal values were not what was displaying. I had to put the record values into a temp table and use my hex file viewer to see that the data was one bit smaller than the "equivalent" datetime constant stored in the same table.

OIC. My problem did not show up once you wrote the date to a field and then used the date from the field. The "extra" value that was in the memory variable of the date was no longer there when it came back from the table's value. It still caused problems if you tried to compare it to a memvar with the "extra" still on it, though.