>it still shows the 1/1/1900 even with the checkbox but I think it would be to much for our users to have to check something and the put in a date, to bad, great interface but doesn't handle empty dates.

Roy,
It still shows the date but dimmed and value is null. If you don't care about calendar part you could do the same with 2 native textboxes. One would replace datetimepicker with no controlsource and value={}.
Cetin