Post Win2k service pack 4 problem

[John P. Looney]

Yesterday, I installed service pack 4 + the latest
hotfixes on some of my webservers. They run different
websites, run by different people.

The problem that all four developed was that any date
comparisons fail. It turns out that no matter what the
regional settings are (they should be 'english(irelan d)'),
it returns american date formats, which break some of the
comparisons.

Again, these sites had been running for months with no
problems. Code like;

strdate = FormatDateTime( Date, vbShortDate)
sqln = "Select
newsid,title,ca tegory,article, expirydate,publ ishdate,access_ level
from news where category=" & "'News'" & " and expirydate >
'" & strdate & "'" & " order by publishdate desc"

Fails with an error;

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e07'

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]The
conversion of a char data type to a datetime data type
resulted in an out-of-range datetime value.

This only cropped up after I installed service pack 4. I
checked every registry setting on the SQL server and the
webserver, including for the webserver user, and they are
all set to "british english" or "english (ireland)" where
appropriate. However, the dates are always coming out of
the database with american format!

Is this a known bug? Is there a workaround ?

John