Elmer,

Thanks a lot, I really appreciate your taking the time.
I suspected that it must be because I did not supply any value for the date field. But it could not have been the case, because the date field already had some previous value. It changes to the date {12/31/1899} in cases of UPDATEs. I'm sure of this because during INSERTs, I supply a value. This is really the 'mystery'.
To shed more light, here's the setup. I put the remote view on the data environment, then set the ControlSource of the field to the date field of the remote view. Does it have anything to do with the way I choose to update the underlying fields (which is SQL UPDATE, not DELETE then INSERT) ?
Again, thanks a lot.