Universal time goes mad under MCL 2.0 and System 7.1?

[angus@aegypt.demon.co.uk (Angus McIntyre)]

Functions dealing with universal time - including 'get-universal-time',
'encode-universal-time', 'file-write-date' and 'file-create-date' appear to
have gone crazy since I installed System 7.1. I don't remember this happening
under System 7.0.1, but now something appears to be deeply wrong. For instance,
if I call 'file-write-date' twice on the same file (without modifying it in
between) I get two different answers!

Inspecting the exploded time returned by 'decode-universal-time' suggests that
everything is OK except for the time-zone, which is a constantly-changing
ratio. The obvious work-around - decoding the time and then re-encoding it
doesn't work because 'encode-universal-time' apparently uses the time-zone
figure in some way (and simply passing in a time-zone argument doesn't help)
so the results can be practically random.

This is happening on a IIci running System 7.1 and MCL 2.0, all extensions off.

Is there a fix for this? Is it even a recognised problem, or am I in a unique
and privileged position of having gremlins only in my computer?

                                                                    A


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