Mmm.. I've dug through Hijack (again!) and there is no code anywhere in Hijack that could do this on purpose.

Bugs of this sort are almost always due to "jiffies wraparound". The kernel "jiffies" variable is the scheduler "clock tick counter", which is incremented by an interrupt every 1/100 of a second. Lots of kernel code uses this to time events, with the caveat that it WILL wrap-around periodically (it's a 32-bit variable, you do the math..)
and thus a time in the future can appear to be a time from the past unless care is taken.

I suppose it may be possible that the new standby timers in the player beta's have a bug? Or maybe the jiffies-fix has triggered a latent bug in the player somewhere? Or maybe I'm just blind.

The Hijack source code is out there for all to see.

-ml