Editorial:

Due to the Commonwealth Games many Australian States have delayed returning to normal time by one week.

What this means is that most Windows computers will automatically wind their clocks back 1 hour from this morning. 

Microsoft have provided a patch of sorts, but it's not their best work by a long shot.  Applying the patch in a corproate environment is not straight forward and, even after applying the patch, users still have to manually edit all of their appointments for this week.  This point alone was going to create big help desk volume.

After calling Microsoft and speaking with other sysadmins, we have decided that rolling out the patch is not worth the trouble.  It creates an entirely new timezone which we would need to create a new GPO so our computers would move to it.  Our solution is to do nothing, we have made our users aware that, for this week, their clocks will be out 1 hour and their alarms may go off an hour earlier...but that's about the only downside we can see.

Microsoft do not even regard their own patch as stable.  At the end of their readme file they basically disown the patch saying we use it at our own risk and it hasn't been tested in any great detail...terrific!  Just the kind of thing you'd want to roll out to an entire company.

To me this highlights the poor functionality in Windows timezones in accomodating exactly this situation.  I understand that in the USA from next year there will be some similar situations.  Perhaps this will get Microsoft moving and working on this feature?