http://www.infoworld.com/articles/ec/xml/00/01/07/000107eclotus.xml

Date-related crash affects Lotus Notes, Domino

By Stephanie Sanborn 

The Y2K bug did not leave Lotus Notes clients or Domino Servers completely
untouched: Lotus has identified a crashing problem related to dates following
the year 2000 or prior to 1950.
 
According to a Technote posted on Lotus' technical support Web site Friday,
there are reported crashes while using Simple Action agents to send a message
that includes a document copy when running LotusScript using the
NotesDocument.RendertoRTItem method, or with the Domino 4.6x SMTP Message
Transfer Agent (MTA).

Lotus' Technote states that most crashing cases occur when sending an e-mail
that includes a copy of a document that "tries to force a post-1999 (or
pre-1950) date value into a text field... As the document is being copied into
the new message, a conversion takes place that results in a crash. This issue
can occur if the date value in the text field is prior to 1950 or any year
after 1999, not just the year 2000."

Affected products include Domino Server version 5.x, 4.6x, 4.5.7, and 4.5.6.
along with Notes client versions 5.x, 4.6x, 4.5.7, and 4.5.6.

The crashing could occur on the Notes client or Domino server, depending upon
which product was running the affected agents. Lotus noted that if the server
executes the agent, the Agent Manager task on Domino can crash, and if the
agent is executed by a user, the Notes client can crash.

In the case of the RendertoRTItem, Agent Manager can crash if a user is running
LotusScript with RendertoRTItem as a scheduled agent. However, the Technote
explains that "if the LotusScript agent is run manually, the Notes client does
not crash. Instead, the date/time values in the rich-text field displays
garbage characters at the end of the field."

Lotus does have a fix for the crashing problem in the works that it expects to
release in an upcoming Quarterly Maintenance Update...