Bitt, you nailed it.

Once again (as expected) the very smart people on the empeg bbs have come through for me.

My time problem was on the Novell server that supplies the music to the radio stations. Not sure exactly how/when my workstation accesses that server, but its time was off by some number of hours + 3 minutes -- a smoking gun if I ever saw one. Interestingly enough, that server's time may not be reset -- if we do so, then all four radio stations will be off the air immediately. Apparently the server (pretty much a black box to us -- we are not allowed to tamper with it in any way, it is controlled entirley by Corporate Headquarters) carries its own [corporate] timestamp and must remain synchronized with corporate and literally thousands of identical servers throughout the country. When I called Prophet tech support (Prophet is the provider of the music management/playing software, and is owned by Clear Channel, the company that owns us) the very knowledgeable lady was almost in a panic making sure that I did not attempt to change the time.

Anyway, the solution to the problem is to go into Novell management on each workstation, delve down about five submenus deep, and change a "Set Time" setting from "On" to "Off". Then the problem will no longer occur.

Just to make it even more fun, it turns out that our billing/traffic software for the radio stations has a failsafe in its licensing agreement whereby if the system clock on the workstation is ever set to a time earlier than the most recent access to the software, the program thinks I am Long John Silver or someone trying to pirate the software and it destroys the license file, requiring a call to technical support and a reload of the software.

Don't you just love it?

tanstaafl.