Default Timezone setting.

Question

I'm having a few problems setting the default timezone in my application. Since all of our work is going to be in the CST timezone I want to make sure that no matter where a person loads the client it will display the times as if they were in the CST timezone.
I can set TimeZone.setDefault(TimeZone.getTimeZone("America/Chicago")); and it seems to work for a while but eventually the program will switch back to the machines timezone. I'm on Windows 2000 and I have been changing the system timezone to make sure that the applet stays in CST. I also tried System.setProperty("user.timezone", "America/Chicago"); but that didn't work at all, the applet still used the machines timezone.
I do have an initialization thread where I set the TimeZone default, is the TimeZone default a per thread instance? It seems like the TimeZone switches from the default I set (CST) to the machines timezone sometime after the initialization thread is finished running.

Answer 1

I tried setting the default timezone in the main method like this :
TimeZone.setDefault(TimeZone.getTimeZone("America/Chicago"));[\code]
Which works in that the main thread the default timezone is but when worker threads are spun off to get data
they show thier default timezone as America/Buenos_Aires.  Is there a way to force a refresh of the Systems
properties cache? That seems to work across threads since I assume the default timezone pulls the same
user.timezone data but only after an unknown amount of time. For instance I ran the application once and it
didn't work at all it kept the America/Buenos_Aires timezone, but then I ran it again and it worked.