STRANGE!!! Windows Xp clock running fast....

Question

Hi guys. Youve helped me in the past so I hope you can help me again!
My MSI system has been running solid as a rock for about 1and1/2years now. Very happy with it. untill now..
It all started after I installed a bluetooth dongle (or so i though). I suddently realised that my xp clock was running fast about 10seconds every minute. I though this is weird so did the obvious things... restarted comp checked bios which was running fine. It is only when I get into windows that it starts to run fast. I uninstalled the bluetooth software thinking it was the culprit but obvoisuly wasnt. I then decided it was about time that i reformatted again anyway so reformatted and sure enough it fixed the problem, proving to me that it is a software problem not a hardware. Then, after about 4 months of my new reformatted system being up and running it suddenly has started doing it again. I havent even installed the bluetooth software or anything that is obviouslty the problem. I dont know if this has anything to do with it but my firewire card has also stopped working for somereason. I replaced it with a new one and that doesnt work either!
Any ideas anyone, ive searched the whole forum and internet and it doesnt seem like a common problem!
Many thanks
Jon.

Answer 1

Hello hurndall:
I see you are running XP/SP2 with all patches.  Besides that, are you running any third party software that monitors communication?  Looking at this from the paranoid perspective, have you run a spyware/malware sweep of your system?
The Windows Time service that you stopped is used to synchronize time across a network and does not directly control your RTC.  Unless systems on your network are using it there will be no effect, so you can probably leave it stopped.
Regarding your fast clock problem, I have had this type of problem on PC platforms that were using the RTC interrupt to start background tasks such as data logging or other hardware.  The hardware RTC clock uses IRQ 8; old MS-DOS software would modify the code associated with this interrupt to give pseudo-real time operation to specific processes.  As I recall there is/was a timer that pinged this IRQ at 13.8 ms intervals and so kept the clock going.  Although the usual symptom in these cases was a clock running SLOW, not fast, it is possible to have a clock run fast due to a bug in the added software.
You can do a rudimentary check on your system by starting Control Panel - System - Hardware - Device Manager - View - Resources By Connection - IRQ
Look at IRQ 8 - it should only be associated with the RTC function.
This is probably not going to get you anywhere but it is something that should be checked anyway.
Looking at your problem from the other direction, it seems that your system has issues with communication devices - Bluetooth, FireWire and now Remote Login.  I'm not sure how you are communicating with your system remotely (network - i.e., ethernet or dial-up, i.e., modem), but you might want to reinstall/update the drivers associated with your Ethernet or Modem hardware.   Since the problem seems to go away on a reinstall, which refreshes all these drivers, you might want to try this.  It's a lot simpler than a reinstall.
The Remote Login Service installs and/or starts a number of services that depend on the svchost.exe module.  It seems unlikely that there is a problem there but you might want to make sure that svchost.exe is truly the SP2 version or whatever is the most recent.  I don't know if any patches since SP2 have modified it.  You could look at another XP system can check the properties of svchost.exe. 
My system reports
File Version 5.1.2600.2180 (xpsp_sp2_rtm.040803-2158)
Product Version 5.1.2600.2180
for svchost.exe
Sorry I can't give you any more specific help.
Good luck,
ss