Fox Pro stores one of three things in a date field:

An actual date (ex 9970727 is 7/27/ 997) 8 Spaces (ASCII 20) 8 Zeros (ASCII 30)

All of these are acceptable to Fox Pro. The Fox Pro driver for the BDE only accepts & 2 as valid dates and returns a translate error for the 3rd (8 ASCII zeros) as it doesn't consider this as a valid date. To fix the problem, restructure the date field to a char field and then restructure the table again changing the char filed back to a date field. This translation writes back only valid values to the date field and fixes the problem.