NTPD and FC3

[Robert]

It seems like I've seen a handful of posts regarding ntpd and FCx. I've 
read the few I've found in the past few days but to no avail.  I'm 
seeing the problem on this machine which worked very well running FC1.  
I did a fresh install of FC3 (on a different hard drive, actually) and 
have not been able to make the ntp daemon work properly.  Meanwhile, I 
have another machine which dual boots FC3 and Win98 and ntpd works well 
on it.  I have been all over the configuration files on both machines 
and decided about 4 hours ago that a fresh start would be good. So, I 
removed the ntp-4.2.0.a.20040617-4 rpm and its dependencies, firstboot 
and system-config-date and reinstalled from the FC3 CDs. I did this on 
both machines, issued a "service ntpd start" on each and went out for 
coffee.
I did nothing on either machine to set time zone or manually set the time.
Here's a quick comparison of the two:

[root at mavis ~]# uname -a
Linux mavis.localdomain 2.6.9-1.667smp #1 SMP Tue Nov 2 14:59:52 EST 
2004 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux

[root at mavis ~]# ntpq
ntpq> pe
     remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset  
jitter
==============================================================================
+time.uswo.net   198.82.1.201     3 u   22   64   77   60.548  -1778.9 
316.669
*0x50a13f43.boan 192.36.134.25    2 u   26   64   77  140.391  -1947.8 
394.214
+blade.avnf.com  212.82.32.15     2 u   25   64   77   55.640  -1768.1 
297.106
 LOCAL(0)        LOCAL(0)        10 l   26   64   77    0.000    0.000   
0.002
ntpq>


[root at clem ~]# uname -a
Linux clem 2.6.9-1.667 #1 Tue Nov 2 14:41:31 EST 2004 i586 i586 i386 
GNU/Linux
[root at clem ~]# ntpq
ntpq> pe
     remote           refid      st t when poll reach   delay   offset  
jitter
==============================================================================
+zoiedog.com     131.107.1.10     2 u  391 1024  377  114.447  -24.679   
1.572
*171.Red-80-36-1 130.206.3.166    2 u  425 1024  377  211.861  -33.906   
1.004
+ns1.pulsation.f 194.2.0.28       3 u  399 1024  377  145.030  -36.732   
3.050
 LOCAL(0)        LOCAL(0)        10 l   48   64  377    0.000    0.000   
0.002
ntpq>                          

Quite a contrast, huh?  I've been fighting this on "mavis" since either 
Thursday or Friday and have *never* seen a poll interval greater than 64 
seconds and I can count on something similar to this:
Nov 14 20:14:59 mavis ntpd[28082]: time reset -2.904915 s
decorating my /var/log/messages about every 15-20 minutes!

I know this has been a long message already but it would be incomplete 
w/o some information about the hardware.
mavis: ASUS A7N8X delux V2.0, AMD XP2600+ 512MB DDR, Maxtor 160 GB, ATI 
Radeon 9000
clem: iWill xa-100+, AMD K6-2 400MHz 320MB PC100 mem, Maxtor 13GB, S3 
virge DX PCI video

Any ideas would be most welcome  'cause I'm fresh out and I don't really 
want to back down to FC1.