... there are
sometimes leading zeros in some of the entries which could be either
in the month and/or the day. Even worse, some years are only two
digits. I need the format to be m/d/yyyy (only 1/1/2009 - not
01/01/09 or any variation thereof) for my calculation in the report to
work. The extract has over a dozen columns with dates I will need to
validate.

Maybe a formula like this would help:
=TEXT(DATEVALUE(A1),"m/d/yyyy")