get.hist.quote question

I've just started using get.hist.quote to download
returns on non-US stocks, and noticed that the period
downloaded is typically shorter than that shown as
available in the yahoo finance website.

e.g.
get.hist.quote("vow.f")
says 
"time series starts 2005-08-17"

yet on the yahoo.finance website I can manually click
on historical prices back to 2000. I get similar
truncated results on other international markets.

I've tried setting the start farther back, that
doesn't help. Any tips on how to get more history?
I'm using windows, R2.21 and 2.30

Regards,
Andrew West