I took a look at this also, as I have the same wish. It seems if you have your textbox setup for dates (either by inheritance or by format D) it automatically checks the validity of a date. In otherwords you can't go on unless the date is correct, so VALID is never fired off.

One possible work around is to set your textbox to only accept numbers and a input mask of something like this "##/##/####". Then in the VALID event run a check on what the user entered.

Good luck if I had more time I'd play around with this more, I wonder if there is a simple workaround.