Once the clock springs forward, your automated coffee maker may still be sleeping when you wake up, and your VCR may miss taping the latest episode of Lost. Older electronics with embedded systems that are programmed to reset time under the old Daylight Saving Time rules will likely have to be manually reset -- assuming the user manuals can be found. And then there's the problem of older operating systems still in use but no longer supported by their vendors.

These are problems that will take some finesse, creativity -- and people such as Frank Perricone.

Perricone is the IT manager of the Vermont Department of Liquor Control and is running some business systems on an unsupported version of the Tru64, a Unix-based operating system. There's no patch for correcting resetting DST to March 11. What do to?

Unix systems share a common legacy, so Perricone turned to Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Solaris operating system for help. He verified that a file in Solaris for managing time was in the same format used by Tru64 and then went to work. After two hours, Perricone believed he had devised a fix, although, as he pointed out, "there's no realistic way for me to test that beforehand."

But once Perricone's system is fixed, it's fixed. That might not be the case for many electronic consumer and office products with embedded systems programmed to change dates on the first Sunday of April, not March 11.