Maybe have another look at my post #3. If the date is stored as a string, it can easily be an invalid date without being Null. Consider "31-Feb-2014#, which will cause CDate() to choke.
But check out the query in my post . . .
I did that and it gave the result of 1, however this query uses unconverted dates. When I enter the query using CDate, I get the data mismatch error.