Define the date field in whatever format you desire, in Access. It's going to keep the internal representation (a float) no matter what you choose. The Decimal portion of the number (should you decide to test the date value by converting it to a long) represents the number of days since 12/30/1899. The statement Cint(Date), currently, should give a number > 36400.

VB6 has a new function "IsDate" that returns a boolean value. You can use this and some combination of the DateAdd function to test a dates validity.