Dates prior to 1902 not working

The key thing about 1902 is that is the oldest value you can store in a 32-bit field. This affects both the way the date is stored in the database and the way PHP handles it. You cannot store a date earlier than 1902 as a timestamp in an INTEGER field because the field is not big enough to store it. That would affect the datestamp field but should not affect a date field (since the ISO date doesn't have that problem).

The other effect of the 32-bit limitation is that standard PHP date(), gmdate(), mkdate(), etc functions, won't work for dates earlier than 1902, even in PHP 5 which has improved date handling. ADODB has some work-arounds for that and PHP 5's new date_create(), date_modify(), etc. functions also work around that problem.

Anyway, if things older than 1902 aren't working, it's most likely that the value is getting trapped by date() or related function somewhere, which can really only be if for some reason your program is not finding ADODB and is resorting to native date functions. Test whether your file is actually getting included by putting something right at the top of it to print() something on your page. If that never shows up, the file is not being found and the question is why. If it is found and you still are having dates cut off, it is something else.

I'm getting around this kind of problem in the 5.2 version of the module by using the native PHP 5 functions where they work, and some built-in wrapper code where they won't -- no more need to use the ADODB file.

I absolutely cannot replicate this. I can create old dates in the dev version in both PHP4 and PHP5. Can anyone else see problems? If so, provide as much info as possible about the way the date is set up.

If this is still a problem it should be fixed in the 5.2 version, which is not quite ready for an official release. You can see that release if you look for 'other releases' on the project page. Try it in a test environment, or be prepared to update it as bugs are found and fixed.