>>It seems a bit silly, doesn't it? I think they need to change this. Being able to manipulate dates, but not display them makes no sense.
>
>No, it makes perfect sense. VFP can manipulate the data any way it wants, but when it does SHORT or LONG, it hands the date off the Windows and says "Here, you deal with it." Windows says, "What the heck is this?" and sends it back. VFP goes "Hey, dude, Windows says no go."

Actually, it would be FABULOUS if it said that! Instead, we get an internal error that's difficult to interpret.

It's sorta like the questions we used to see about "out of disk" errors on Novell networks when the user who created the directory was deleted. Fox would issue APPEND BLANK or whatever, Novell would say "Nope." Fox would report the nearest error message it could figure, instead of "The network said NO". <g>