the clock stopped in F7 ?!

[Lonni J Friedman]

I've got a Fedora 7 (x86) system that started exhibiting truly bizarre
behavior about a week ago.  Basically, the clock stopped working.  If
I run 'date' it shows the date/time from a few days earlier, and it
*never* changes.  If I touch a file, it has the date/timestamp from
the time/date in date output.  The odd thing is that this behavior
only happens when the system sits relatively idle for a long chunk of
time (at least 24 hours).  If i'm actively using it every day, then
its fine.  If I reboot, then the problem goes away (and the system has
the correct time after rebooting).

The first time that this happened was last weekend (Aug 18), and I had
to reboot it last Monday (Aug 20) to fix the problem.  Its now
happened again.  At this moment in time, date claims that its Sat Aug
25, even though its actually Sun Aug 26 right now.

To make matters worse, the system behaves oddly when this problem
occurs.  I suspect its because anything that relies on getting an
accurate (or changing) clock is failing.  If I attempt to reboot
cleanly, it just never happens.  The system acts frozen in time.

I've checked dmesg & messages, and there's nothing there.  messages
just stops logging anything around the time that the clock appears to
have frozen.

Anyone ever seen this bizarre behavior, or have any ideas what might
be going on?