Comment 53 for bug 43745

> access to the CMOS in a way that tends to draw down the battery?

This sounds wrong. Whenever I had this problem with the CMOS clock I just removed the CMOS battery for about 30 seconds and reinserted the same battery and everything was working again. So the battery was not empty and I never replaced it with a new battery. I'm still pretty sure the kernel just sometimes corrupts somehow something in the BIOS (A very exact explanation, isn't it? ;-). Removing and re-inserting the battery just causes the BIOS to reset properly so everything works again. And it must be the kernel which corrupts the BIOS and no other appliations because I can reproduce the problem by just starting the kernel again and again with the option init=/sbin/reboot. So in my opinion fiddling around with the /etc/init.d/hwclock stuff is not a solution.