Hi Martin,

A few comments to add to what Alan has written:

You mentioned that "...this may be the case if there
was a setting somewhere within the program that is set to
select comets within a certain amount of days from the sun."
The only comet filtering that's done is magnitude based.
I'd set a fainter limiting magnitude, _and_ (as Alan
suggested) use the 'get updated comets from MPC' function.

For asteroids, there are a few things to keep in mind.
If you're just using Guide's "built-in" asteroid data, you
may get skewered by the problem described here:

http://www.projectpluto.com/faq_curr.htm#missing_asteroids

Basically, you may need asteroid data from the second Guide
disk. The above page describes how to do this.

However, the better solution is the one described by Alan:
downloading and using the MPCorb database. This will give you
all the most recent asteroids, instead of just those known when
the Guide 8 CDs were pressed. There's one small catch here, too:
the Minor Planet Center has changed the format of MPCORB. To get
Guide to use it, you'll need to get the latest version of the
Guide software at

http://www.projectpluto.com/new.htm

I tend to recommend doing this anyway, since the update has
plenty of nifty new features and a few bug fixes.

-- Bill