@mjg59 I feel like faking that database would have required a VM or real hardware of correct vintage, a fitting OS, being isolated from the outside world, setting the date in BIOS setup before installing the OS, and then carefully, over several reboots while warping time again in setup, making those DB entries.
And then the email problem would still have existed. I think the trickiest part there was the Gmail format change. Not insurmountable, but you'd need to be aware of the problem first.
@klausman it's really hard! Another instance in the same case involved wastebasket metadata that corresponded to a later version of Windows than was supposed to be associated with the drive