First time poster, LONG time user of Media Jukebox and now Media Center... Just did a search on "Year 0" and this came up first....
My issue is similar, but with just the ID3v1 tag of "year". Not sure if this is the tag field you are talking about but here goes:
My collection is around 300,000 MP3 files. No other media or file types with MC, only MP3 files. I'm a total neat freak as well. I've had WAY too many MP3 players over the years (anyone remember Creative's 6GB Jukebox?). Every player tends to "display" the files differently. Now, my car stereo is much the same... Everything displays a little differently. Cover art with the Iphone, others that display just the file names, etc.
Back when my collection was around 80GB (say 35,000 MP3's) I started keeping my ID3v1 tags (and file names) correct so that I could move files between MP3 players with no fuss.
I have since noticed a "feature" with MC and the MP3 "year" tag. Modifying just the year
doesn't always force an update of the file. I've triple tested this today on multiple OSes : Vista Ultimate 32-Bit, XP with SP2, and Windows 7 RTM x64. All do the same thing. And with two different versions of MC: Latest 13 build and most current 14 build. The year shows correctly in MC. But "sometimes", if you check the file properties in Vista, XP, and Windows 7 the modified date is not what it should be. Viewing the extended properties via the OS, the dates are wrong, blank, 0 or whatever they started out as. And... If you purge your library and re-import, the year is reset back to what it was. Very strange and frustrating. I have / had about 20,000 files affected by this.
I don't use any fancy features of MC. I replicate my files between my work and home systems, not my library. And even though it's been changed on one OS / Drive / Volume (doesn't matter which and which direction), the changes are not replicated because the file has not actually been modified. I think that's the key for me... The file appears to be modified in MC, but it's not to the OS. It's the only ID3v1 tag I've found that doesn't always physically update the file.
But there is a workaround:
Easiest one I've found is to remove and re-add (or just re-add) cover art. If you save the cover art in the file, it will always force a write to the file with the correct info. The cover art might be rare, if it's already there, just use the copy to clipboard option... Remove and use the paste from clipboard (nice feature for the rare stuff!). If that doesn't work, then I'd suggest converting the file to another loss-less media type, and re-encode back to MP3 and should solve the problem. Or even change another tag field (along with the date) and then change back to what said field should be.
Maybe it is the MP3 file itself. Only files I've found that have this issue are my REALLY old MP3s.
Your issue might be different... Can't say I've seen stuff reset to a date like 1969... I mostly see the year as BLANK or 0 with the affected files. But now that I've read your post, I'm going to have to go back and check
Hope this helps!
-Regards.