Reconcile issue

[Russell Mercer]

Hi,

I have a bank account that I am trying to reconcile that I am having a
serious issue with.  Here is the situation and steps I have gone
through so far.

1.  Reconciled the account from opening to Oct. 2008.  Finished
reconcile correctly.
2.  Reconciled individually, months from Oct. to December 2008.
Finished these reconcile operations correctly.
3.  Began to reconcile December 2008, found that I was off $366.
Looked in account register, and saw that this amount was previously
reconciled, so it did not show up in the reconcile window.
4.  Postponed reconcile.
5.  Entered register window and unreconciled this transaction.
6.  Enter reconcile of this account again, for Dec. 2008.  Upon
matching all credits and debits to the account, including the
transaction that was previously not being shown, the balance is still
off by $366.  Basically, it is indicating that I need an additional
deposit of $366 to balance out the reconcile.
7.  In order to see if I could clear this out, I unmarked all
transactions for Dec, and Nov. to try to work back from the October
balance that had been successfully reconciled.  This should put the
balance at the total prior to this $366 being included.  When
Completing a reconcile for November 2008, the balance is now off by
$366.
8.  I have come to the conclusion that the Opening balance, which is
supposed to be a running total of all amounts that have been
reconciled in the account, is VERY EASILY CORRUPTED.  In addition,
there is no way to modify this, and so I am now stuck with potentially
having to add in a dummy transaction to balance this out.  Of course,
this means that my account balance in GnuCash, would not match the
true Bank Balance.  Besides which, I HATE to have to hack a program to
get it to seem accurate, because that is not really accurate.

I need help to figure out some way to roll the Opening Balance total
back to what it is supposed to be, thus, to Subtract $366 from the
Opening Balance.

Some thoughts on improvements to the Reconcile process.
1.  First of all, please let us modify the beginning balance of the
reconcile process.  I should not be trapped because something
corrupted the beginning balance value in my file.  When you start the
reconcile, the beginning balance should default to the ending balance
of the last completed reconcile, but that should be all.  Not being
able to modify it means that I don't know exactly how it is being
calculated, or if it is working correctly.
2.  It would be useful to show all transactions in the reconcile
window, up to your ending date, whether they have been previously
reconciled or not.  This would allow you to see something as in the
above situation where there was a transaction that was marked as
reconciled, that I was not aware of, but it ended up causing problems
with all of my numbers.
3.  Do not pre-check all transactions within date range of reconcile
process.  This may be different for others, but I go through my
statement and check off each transaction as I match it on the
register.  This means that I have to uncheck all transactions first.

Any help on the above situation would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,
Russell