I recently ran across a problem with the date/time data

that is output to a text file from the system monitor.  The error came to

light as I was preparing an analysis on a series of performance monitoring data

files for an upcoming article.  I noticed that the times being recorded

were not the times that I had scheduled for monitoring.  In fact, they were

consistently 5 hours off.  It turns out that there is a known issue with

this in Windows 2000, and Microsoft has a supported fix for it (KB article

Q262857).  You will need to call

Microsoft support and ask for the fix.  Reference the KB article to clue them in, and you shouldn't have to pay for any support.  

Without the fix, the date and time recorded in the log file is set to UTC

(Universal Time Coordinate) instead of your local time (unless you actually live

in the GMT time zone), making it somewhat more difficult to coordinate

performance data with the actual occurrence of events on your system. 

I have a utility that converts the wide matrix of performance information in

these (or any) log files into row-based data, and stores the results in a narrow

table.  It is easy enough to update the date and time for the existing

records, so all of the data will be uniform after I apply the fix.

Some other items to note: Binary log files are not affected by this

problem.  I thought that this date/time issue may have

been fixed with SP1, but a cursory search of the knowledge base and the list of

bug fixes did not turn up anything definitive.  Also, this is not a problem

on every Windows 2000 machine - so only apply the fix if needed.

Thanks go out to Andy Warren for locating the KB article.