Leap year bug zaps Zune music players

An internal clock driver problem caused Microsoft's Zune players to malfunction , Agence France-Presse reports. Excerpt:

Thousands of the MP3 music players froze on New Year's Eve around t he world due to what Microsoft described as a bug in the device's internal cloc k. The bug only affected the original, 30-gigabyte version of the music player tha t was introduced by the Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft in 2006 as its answ er to Apple's wildly popular iPod. Later devices with 80GB and 120GB of memory were not affected.

This forum offered an explanation. It says:

After doing some poking around in the source code for the Zune's cl ock driver (available free from the Freescale website), I found the root cause of the now-infamous Zune 30 leapyear issue that struck everyone on New Year's E ve. The Zune's real-time clock stores the time in terms of days and seconds since J anuary 1st, 1980. When the Zune's clock is accessed, the driver turns the numbe r of days into years/months/days and the number of seconds into hours/minutes/s econds. Likewise, when the clock is set, the driver does the opposite. The Zune frontend first accesses the clock toward the end of the boot sequence. Doing this triggers the code that reads the clock and converts it to a date an d time. Below is the part of this code that determines the year component of th e date.

Zune.net has already posted a solution to this problem here.