One of the default settings in MT is not really nice: the way it formats dates. If your MT site displays leading zeros on the first nine days of each month (for example, "August 08, 2005"), it's caused by the default date format "%x".
The blog owner can fix this easily enough by editing the templates. Where the default "Main Index" template has this:
<h2><$MTEntryDate format="%x"$></h2>change it to
<h2><$MTEntryDate format="%B %e, %Y"$></h2>and the leading zeros will go away.
Repeat the process on each of the archive templates you use, and rebuild all the pages.
