Paul Barrett wrote:
> System is a IBM Workstation P4 with 512megs of ram ...
>
> The problem is that after setting the time with rsync and hwclock within
> about two ours they are drastically out of sync...
This problem may be the same one that is described at
http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=203818
which also describes an IBM P4 system where time does strange things.
There are some suggested things to try.