Can someone please attempt to implement the work-around I suggested in http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=17123 or explain why it wouldn't work?

All that needs to be done is provide wrappers on the native mktime(), localtime(), etc. calls.  I would attempt this myself but I don't have access to the necessary tools so I can't contribute to the CVS.

It's nice to have the documentation updated to highlight the problem with Windows, but that isn't a solution and this problem makes it impossible for me to recommend PHP under Windows for our database activities (some people were born before 1970 so we have to be able to cope with those dates).

Alternatively, maybe somebody knows how every other Windows application copes with this?  JScript, for example, has exactly the same timestamp model and it copes with negative timestamps.