Why does the program put 0's in front of my years dates when I type in something like 12/13/45? Why does the system allow more than four digits to be entered for the year?

This is actually the correct behavior. After the Y2K issue the general consensus is that for years you have to explicitly enter all of the digits for the year you want. In this case if you simply enter "45" you are referring to the year 45 AD. The reason that you can enter more digits is that these are legitimate dates. Granted they are way in the future, but since we do not limit what the fields are used for there could be a reason to enter a year that far in the future. For most dates in the AT we do not allow entry of dates in the future. For the user defined dates this is not enforced again because we do not know what they are going to be used for.