Hi Clay,

Something has just occurred to me...

What exactly did you do to persuade your computer not to
adjust for daylight saving time?

I've been assuming that if one left the "automatically adjust
clock for daylight saving changes" box unchecked, then the computer
would simply behave as if DST had never existed. In that case,
selecting "GST" (either the UK or the Casablanca/Monrovia flavors)
and leaving the box unchecked would result in your computer
effectively running on UTC. After all, if you lived in the UK
and didn't bother fiddling with your clocks twice a year, you'd
be on UTC.

However, the testing I've done suggests that this is _not_
what that check-box means. All it means is that, if you leave
that box unchecked, Windows won't push the displayed time ahead
or back by an hour each spring and fall; it will leave it to you
to do that, manually. It will continue to assume that, during
the summer, the difference between Eastern US time and UT is
four hours. Or, in your case, that the difference between UK
time and UT is one hour, dropping to zero difference in winter.
Which is why, in summer, you have to set TOFFSET=1 (or -1),
and in winter, TOFFSET=0. In short, the behavior you and I
(and others) are seeing is, in the eyes of Microsoft, "not a bug;
it's a feature".

All of which still seems pretty crazy to me. It appears to
be a relatively common problem. Other operating systems take the
sensible approach of having the system clock run in UTC in the
first place, rather than in local time, but configuring Windows
to do this involves use of Regedit:

http://superuser.com/questions/185773/does-windows-7-support-utc-as-bios-time

(Not a Win7 only fix, despite the title; it goes back at
least to XP.) If you're desperate, you could try that fix. But
the TOFFSET= one may be simpler.

-- Bill