It began this morning when I noticed my clock showed the wrong time and my calendar tickler was giving me wrong appointment times. I resynchronized my clock and the problems cleared up.
By the time I got to my wife's computer, her clock was correct and I had no way to tell for sure it the problem was netwide or merely on my computer. End of issue, I thought.
Then, late this afternoon, my wife notices she hasn't gotten any mail through Microsoft Outlook for four days.
What happened four days ago? All four of our computers got updated to IE8.
So then I remembered other date-related issues I have been reading about on these boards: Scheduled scans that didn't take place, etc. So I open NIS and -- sure enough! -- it said my updates were four days old. But when I ran Live Update I got the right updates (a small package of virus sigs) and it still said the virus defs were four days old. A little bit of tinkering did not improve the situation.
So I did two things. (I should only have done one, but my wife was irritated and in a hurry.)
What was unnecessary was my telling MS Office to detect and repair itself, keeping shortcuts, etc. I thought that maybe my Outlook problem was a distinct issue.
What I did do was the most common and simplest fix of all. After making sure her time synch was now correct, I rebooted.
And within minutes (seconds, probably) her Outlook was collecting four days worth of mail and the NIS console was showing her computer as being up-to-date.
What happened?
I have no clue.
But my guess is that something in the IE8 installation caused a problem in the synchronization of the computer with the windows time site. That this impact was internal and affected any software that was performing schedule-based activity or recording the results of that activity. Changing the clock did not fix the issue, but rebooting did. Hopefully, it was a one-time problem.
A few of the many remaining questions: Was this computer based, or network based? Was something directly wrong on my computer or was it being fed mistranslated information through the browser connection or through something affected by the browser installation?
And (as an edited insertion) was this or was this not an IE8 problem at all?
Maybe this will help explain some of the issues other posters have had over this weekend.