my experience with domain-controller-dependent Windows time and "NET TIME" isn't very positive

To solidify Jim's implication, is it possible that your domain controller (assuming you have one) has its clock off? Or maybe that its time zone is wrong? Or maybe that its time zone is off and its clock is wrong by three minutes?

Windows has this neat feature of being smarter than you, and part of that is distributing its time from the domain controller (and possibly the browse master, in a domain-less environment) to all of its clients. I believe that you can disable this at both the server and at the client. To see if that's the problem, you might try disabling the client's time service. Don't know what OS you're running, but if it's an NT-type system (that is, NT, 2000, or XP), try stopping the Windows Time service. You can do this GUI-ly, or you might be able to run ``net stop w32time''.