You are using a Cygwin build, correct? The same thing bit me a few days ago. I was just lucky enough to only embarrass myself at my workplace and not out on the net. :) I believe that the problem is in Cygwin, but I have not yet confirmed that with the obvious test program. david Paul> CYGWIN+X, of course. Paul> % xemacs -vanilla Paul> (let ((now (current-time))) Paul> (list Paul> (current-time-string now) Paul> (current-time-string))) Paul> => ("Fri Jan 02 17:45:50 1970" "Wed Feb 17 17:42:50 1999") Paul> This seems to be the reason why my postings yesterday had bad Date:'s.