There's definately something quirky about the player<->RTC clock interactions.

I've just installed Roger's base-tar distribution so that I could set up ntpdate, and when testing 'date' from the command line, I get:

"Thu Apr 27 21:49:29 /home/empeg/arm 2034"

and this is about 3 minutes after having set the date and clock right.
Now, the "home/empeg/arm" entry definately looks dodgy. It should return the timezone, but appears to be returning the start of a path.

And then when I run ntpdate, I get:
"27 Oct 21:54:57 ntpdate[43]: Can't adjust the time of day: Invalid argument" due to the year being so out of whack.

Then running:
sh-2.03# date 102817582002
Mon Oct 28 17:58:00 /home/empeg/arm 2002
sh-2.03# date
Mon Oct 28 17:58:02 /home/empeg/arm 2002
sh-2.03# ntpdate ntp_server
28 Oct 17:57:22 ntpdate[49]: step time server 192.168.1.1 offset -46.919752 se

resets the date correctly, but still results in the wrong TZ being presented by 'date'.