>Wait a sec. How could that be? If the date is EMPTY() then use a blank string! So if the date is empty, it's not even a date, per se, anymore.

Okay, problem solved :) Things are never what they seem, or something like that. Someone else did the coding for this - I finally opened up the app and traced the cursor creation. And it had DTOC() on the date in the SQL (why, I don't know). Once I removed that, it's fine. Thanks to all who helped me work through this....