Back in April we had a thread on xmlrpclib's problematic handling of dates
before 1900:

    http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.devel/93273/focus=93309

I'm still of the opinion that strftime() is the culprit and xmlrpclib is
just an innocent bystander.  Guido worried that to correct this we'd have 
to
implement strftime() from scratch.

I took a different approach and scouted around for an existing version of
strftime() which we could suck into the distribution.  I found a modified
version of the BSD 4.4 strftime which came with (I see to recall) Tcl.
The attached patch is against the py3k svn repo.  It passes all tests as
far as I can tell.

Also, see http://bugs.python.org/issue1777412 which appears to be related.