Microsoft confirms obscure Windows time bug

Microsoft Corporation confirmed on Tuesday that many Windows applicationswill report the wrong time for a week in 2001 unless a yet-to-released fixis implemented. The bug affects Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT. Ithas been already fixed in beta versions of Windows 2000. It was discoveredby a programmer at Phar Lap Software, who reported it to Microsoft and abug-tracking mailing list.

"The problem is caused by the Visual C++ runtime library being confused andassuming that daylight savings time doesn't start until April the 8th," says Smith. "The confusion appears to be caused by the fact that April 1 falls on a Sunday in the year 2001. The same bug occurs in other years where April 1 also falls on a Sunday."

Microsoft says it will fix the bug but doesn't think it's that big of adeal.

"This has been blown a little bit out of proportion," says Chris Hargarten,a Visual C++ product manager. "For daylight savings time on April 1, we failed to calculate the one-hour time difference for one week's time. Anapplication that uses a specific function called 'local time' will beaffected. We've got two years [to fix this]. We have bugs all the time, andwe take them very seriously. We have the processes in place to take care ofthis.