Re-reconciliation

[Stuart McGraw]

Hello,

How do I change a transaction that has been reconciled?
I imported 10+ years of data from MS Money, most of which
was already reconciled.  I have a 2004-09-22 transaction
in a credit card account which was a transfer from the wrong
expense account on the wrong date, but the amount was
unchanged.

  2004-09-22 "Bought something" Expense:Something "y" $500

I deleted that transaction and created a new transaction:

  2004-09-24 "Bought something" Expense:SomethingElse "n" $500

(The Expense side of the transaction was never reconciled
so changes to that side are not a problem.)
I discovered I cannot directly click the Reconciled column
into the "y" state.  So I tried to reconcile by specifying
a reconcile date of 2004-09-30 but the reconcile window is
showing many recent unreconciled transactions from 2008
and those (which are still screwed up post-import from
Money) are preventing the balances from matching.

Why is the reconciliation process paying attention to any
transactions after 2004-09-30?

I finally fixed my problem by directly editing the xml file
but would like to figure out the right way to do this for
the future.

(I realize in retrospect I could have just changed the
Expenses:Something to Expenses:SomethingElse in the original
transaction without doing a deletion/recreation of the
transaction but there are more complicated situations
that may require adding a new transaction to a previously
reconciled month (without changing the month's final
balance), so I would still like to understand how to do it.)