I moved my time up by 4 hours. Now it's even more confusing. hwclock and the taskbar are the same now (Yes, I restarted X). But the taskbar should be showing NYC time, not UTC. Date & Time now is 4 hours ahead just like I would expect hwclock to output.

Does this seem strange to you?

Leave it set as utc for now. Now try hwclock --hctosys
Logout and login again (just to make sure).
What does the KDE clock say?
In a terminal date.
Are the times the same?
If they are the same, but incorrect, now just set the time by R-clicking the kde clock and "adjust date and time".

Well, yes & no!
I am doing other things, and we are cross-posting, which isn't helping either!
Time is complicated, because we have this (stupid?) system where it is "different" times all over the world at the same time !
So for me it is 16:57 and for you it is probably 11:57, or was at any rate.
So to introduce some sanity, most people run their hardware clock as UTC. When you want to know the time, you do not read the hardware clock. Instead you make a system-call that says "what time is it?" The kernel reads the HW clock, and then makes adjustments according to your timezone, for offset from GMT or UTC and appropriate adjustments for "Summer time" or "Daylight saving", according to the date.
Your times were showing differently because you had the HW clock set to localtime, and the kernel thought it was UTC, so it applied the UTC/GMC offsets and "Daylight saving" adjustments when it shouldn't have.

Now, please try what I put in post #17

Nope.
My clock says: 8:12
pc:/etc/default# date
Sun Jul 1 12:11:51 UTC 2007
pc:/etc/default# hwclock
Sun 01 Jul 2007 12:12:03 PM UTC -0.314104 seconds

Should I just adjust my time now, up 4 hours?

Grrrr! This is doing my head in
Please try hwclock --hctosys --localtime (You may need to be root to do this)

Then logout, login, check your KDE clock, and date commands.
FWIW I get this:
tgar@vaio:~$ date
Sun Jul 1 17:30:09 BST 2007
It says BST because we are on British Summer Time (Edit: So perhaps my HW clock is really set to localtime)
My KDE clock says the same time, and I have its timezone set to[*]Local Time Zone

Grrrr again!
The command succeeded but did nothing.
date: Sun Jul 1 21:53:12 UTC 2007
KDE: 17:53

This sort of problem really annoys me, and I like to get it fixed.
At the moment, I'm not quite sure what settings you currently have, so....
Please be so good as to reboot (if you haven't done so since you last messed with anything to do with time).

Then give me the outputs from the following commands:
cat /etc/adjtime
cat /etc/default/rcS | grep UTC
cat /etc/timezone
date

And tell me what time the KDE clock is showing at the time you ran those commands above.
Then I'll try and work out what is going wrong

I was hoping that you'd also tell me what time the KDE clock said at the time you issued those commands.
Try this:
Edit /etc/default/rcS and set UTC=yes
Reboot
As root, run tzconfig. "Change" your timezone to New_York even if that is what it says is already selected.
R-Click your KDE clock and set it to the correct local time and date.

Now post the result of your ./TimeFix script and the time as shown by the KDE clock.

I think tzconfig showed our answer:
Your current time zone is set to Unknown

I set it to New_York and I'll let you know if this does not fix it.

I had exactly the same problem and went to your discussion to find a solution. I stumbled onto the solution on my own. Using the KDE GUI I went to System/Time and Date. It did not show a time zone selected so I selected Denver. That seemed to change nothing. I went to System/Time and Date again. It showed the time 7 hours behind what it is in Mountain. I tried changing the time to the current Mountain time. That fixed the problem. Now date gives the same time as the task bar.