Thanks, Larry - RE:> (Not the problem you report but:) > Your bind_text call appears to include the "+00:00" part Yes, the '+HH:MM' Timezone offset is part of the ISO 8601 standard format that strftime claims to support, and which the server my code receives the the timestamps from produces them in. No, I am not using any $my_table parameters in the actual query. I did try using .param in the shell, and that does work OK . But see the my last comment - it includes a complete program that compiles and runs fine under Linux, but under Windows, the strftime('%s', ?, 'utc') + ? call is ALWAYS returning NULL .