Album release year broken in Zune software?

I am in the process of moving my classical music collection to the Zune software. I have all of my collection sorted in to albums by the work, and the "release year" is set to the year the music was composed. However, I'm running into a few problems.

1) I can't set release years earlier than 1800 in the zune software itself, it doesn't validate, even though it is a 4 character year as per the ID3 standard

Example: Mozart wrote Kyrie in D minor, K. 368a in 1781, but entering the year 1781 doesn't validate.

2) Files with a year set earlier than 1753 show up as 1753 in the Zune software.

Example: des Victoria wrote Officium Defounctorum in 1603, and when I set the ID3 tag in Windows Explorer to 1603, it shows up as 1753 in the Zune software.

This seems to be a fairly serious bug in that it breaks the ID3 specification for tagging - are there any solutions that would allow for tagging with very early years?

(Note, it appears that Windows Explorer and iTunes all handle this data correctly, and Windows Media Player has internal support for this data, but doesn't read or write the information to the file correctly)

I'm using Windows 7 Ulitimate x64, with the Zune 4.0 x64 software.

This looks as though it's a MS database issue, Access/ODBC/SQL, all have built in date handling from "between Jan 1 1753 and Dec 31 9999".

Just go to http://www.microsoft.com/technet and do a search for "1753" and the screen just fills with reported problems.

Not sure if there will be a fix for this - I can also confirm it's not just you this happens too.

 

Great, so they're using a date field for what could effectively be an integer field considering there's no support for any information other than years. Seems as though they COULD fix this by converting the field to an integer value... but that would probably take work... and it would probably mess up some stuff in their store code, etc.

Hmpff... I so wanted to use the Zune software to manage my collection... it's such great software... it's too bad they decided to make this arbitrary decision which seems to (in my understanding) violate the ID3 spec by, ironically, treating the release date as an actual date instead of a 4 digit number (5 digit in 10000).