I maintain a site that is generating some strange behavior... It's a custom built event registration app. Events have event_dates that are stored in the MySQL db. This code retrieves the event title and event date for display on the registration acknowledgment page: $q2 = "SELECT title, event_date, DATE_FORMAT(event_date, '%M %d, %Y') AS formatted_event_date FROM events WHERE id =" . $eid . ";"; $result = mysql_query($q2); if ($result) { $row = mysql_fetch_array($result); $title = $row['title']; if(strtotime($row['event_date'])) { $event_date = date("F m, Y", strtotime($row['event_date'])); } else { $event_date = $row['formatted_event_date']; } Sometimes, it doesn't work. Every 3rd or 4th registration notification email comes through with an empty value for event_date. There are no other references to the variable $event_date. It works most of the time. There's no pattern I can see. I even tried to force it to show a date by selecting a formatted date and displaying that if the original programmer's strtotime failed. Where do you look for help with intermittent failures of a date field in the DB? -- John Corry PHP developer - 3by400, Inc http://www.3by400.com