Gabor, thanks for taking this on.
We all agree that Views etc. are a much more complete solution. I think we can also agree that views + event + CCK are not ready for a core The narrow solution which the core archive module provides -- of browsing by date -- is fine...it's just narrow.
I have updated the CVS HEAD version of the contrib archive.module, so it works nicely with Drupal 4.7 and HEAD (tested with HEAD on a database updated from 4.7). It still has three fundamental issues: - One query is not pgsql compatible. As it turned out at http://drupal.org/node/29676 it is not a trivial fix. - Timezones are surely not properly handled yet. Codemonkeyx sometimes added, sometimes substracted the timezone offset from dates. I have not yet looked into this. - Theme functions are not up to par to core standards. I tried to get CSS ids, function names, function parameters, menu system parameter handling, page callbacks and such up to core standrads. The good in the updated module is that it is now a drop in replacement for archive module (no need to patch anything). It does not have the calendar block for some reason (comment on the issue above, if you think that should not be lost). But it does have a much improved browsing interface. Since this archive module was intended as a core archive module replacement, it does not have a project page, neither an issue queue. Therefore maybe the above issue is the proper place to add your opinions on the module. Gabor