Access date prob

I have an interesting problem with Access 97 or 2k and VB6 :

i have a lot of records with the field 'fdate' (which is a 'date' type field) set to '1/08/1999', if I run the following query :

"SELECT * FROM sometable WHERE fdate = #1/08/1999#"

it returns an empty recordset, but, If I switch the month and day like #08/1/1999# the query works ok, why? is access taking international settings for date/time from somewhere else?

(comment : my regional setting under windows is dd/mm/yyyy)

this doesn't suit my needs, anyone knows where can I tell access the date format?

Thanks in advance