It's 2008 and I have imported Jan 1 photos but there is no 2008 blue folder under library like my previous years. These are not regular blue folders rather a double rectangle in blue with an asterisk in the bottem right corner. How is this created? Thanks. Great site!

Those are built-in smart albums and there is nothing you can do about them:

I never use them. If you find where they are defined and change them, then Aperture will put them back to their defaults. But you would think that 2008 would have been automatically created since it follows 2007. Every time, so far at least.

The fix is to make regular smart albums for years. I click on Library and create a new smart album like this:

By selecting the library first, the scope of this smart filter is the entire library. Renaming the new smart album and clicking on the magnifying glass gives me the filter dialog. Notice that the title says (Library), showing the scope. I could use the + pop-up top right to add a Date line to the filter and then set a range of dates:

But this is messy. Once the dates are entered they change to include the time and time zone. When I set up one for 2007 the filter did not find images I had shot during the last 8 hours of 2007. I am 8 hours behind UTC, so I assume that this filter works on UTC. Handy for those who require the same universal time comparison worldwide so that everyone agrees on when 2008 starts and ends, but not what I need.

So I go for the quick fix by selecting select EXIF from the + button top right and matching the Capture Year:

In both cases I select Ignore stack groupings in order to allow images inside stacks to be included.