Crashes when clock year is five digit

I just thought I'd share this very strange error I just recovered from. Maybe
this will help someone else and maybe this is something that needs to be
fixed by Microsoft - at least to me it seems like this could be a potential
voulnerability? Or maybe it's already a known issue even though I couldn't
find anything about it.

After applying the Microsoft December update (I'm using WinXP SP2) I started
getting all kinds of strange errors, some examples:
- Grisoft AVG antivirus would crash on startup and give me error message and
a error dump stating Exception code: C0000005 ACCESS_VIOLATION
- Skype would crash on startup.
- Sun Java update process would crash on stratup.
- Running Ad-Aware could not start properly and/or download updates.
- Running Microsoft and/or Windows update just gave an error message saying
basically "there is something wrong with the web server right now, cannot
run, check back later"
- World Community Grid wouldn't start
- I couldn't log on to some forums I frequently visit, my guess was that
cookies were somehow being blocked. After awhile I found out that it didn't
work in IE but Firefox was ok.

Naturally I thought I had gotten some kind of virus. Since I couldn't get my
own Antivirus to work I went to Trend Micro's online scan ("HouseCall").
Using their "browser kernel" (active-x?) did not work at all, using the "java
kernel" did a 1 second scan of my entire computer! (ie it did not scan it at
all) and came back saying my computer is ok.

I restarted in safe mode, did chkdsk, defrag, removed page file, searching
the net for a solution etc. etc. and spent many hours last night trying to
get a grip on this.

Then just now I surfed a page in Firefox and got a certificate warning where
I notice my date is 18 December 40105. Year 40105 - What?? (give or take a
few hundred years, it's a five digit year, everything except the year is
correct) I double click my clock to correct it using "Update time" from the
"Internet time" tab but I get a time out error so after a few attempts I set
the year manually and --- everything starts working ok again!! (at least so
it seems at this time)

I don't know if this actually had anything to do with the December update or
if it's just my computer (I've been getting a lot of blue screens lately,
think I have some kind of hw failure) or maybe I somehow have changed the
date myself without noticing or it's just something else.
I would also get several Microsoft crash report dialogs - "Would you like to
report this error to MS" - and sent several of theese but none came back with
the solution - ie "Your clock is f**ked up".

I haven't tried to recreate this - I'm just all too happy having my computer
work again - but my guess is all you have to do is set the system date to a
year that is five digit.

Your thoughts on this?

Max

Ps: Sorry if I should be posting in some other newsgroup, please direct me
if I'm at the wrong place.
.