For these older products, "consumers may not have an other option but to manually reset the time four times this year: once when DST starts on March 11; three weeks later, when the device thinks DST is supposed to start; and again in the fall, when DST ends and the date when the device thinks it's supposed to end [arrives]," according to Steven Ostrowksi, the spokesman for The Computer Technology Industry Association Inc. (CompTIA), an Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.-based IT training and industry group.

While the big vendors are issuing patches for their systems, DST poses management challenges for businesses that have to make sure their systems can handle the time change. A home VCR user can fiddle with the remote and hope for the best, but IT users will not only have to patch systems, but also test to ensure that everything will run as it should, said Matt Zito, chief scientist at GridApp Systems Inc., a database management vendor in New York.

All systems will have to be checked, and if something goes wrong -- such as if the time of a financial transaction isn't recorded correctly -- then workers will have to go through the entire stack of applications and systems to find the source of the problem. If anything is unpatched on March 11, "you are going to spend huge amounts of time trying to figure out where it went wrong," he said.

Vendor patches notwithstanding, users on mailing lists and newsgroup discussions are also popping up to discuss what fixes are needed. The Hewlett-Packard e3000 mailing list has seen some postings on the topic, including comments on the list from Shawn Gordon, president of The Kompany, a software development firm in Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif.

Gordon has previously written code to help e3000 users ensure that their software and hardware are running in sync, and he isn't worried about that system adapting to the time change. But Gordon wonders about consumer electronics.