If you are using or able to use PHP 5.3.x or later, you can use its DateTime object functionality:
$date_a = new DateTime('2010-10-20 08:10:00');
$date_b = new DateTime('2008-12-13 10:42:00');
$interval = date_diff($date_a,$date_b);
echo $interval->format('%h:%i:%s');
You can play with the format in a variety of ways, and once you have dates in DateTime objects, you can take advantage of a lot of different functionality, for example comparison via normal operators. See the manual for more: http://us3.php.net/manual/en/datetime.diff.php