Microsoft blames leap year for Zune freeze

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28449091/

By Jasmin Aline Persch
msnbc.com updated 1 hour, 1 minute ago

Microsoft said Wednesday that a leap year issue caused problems with the 30-gigabyte versions of its Zune digital music player, following a flood of online customer complaints about the devices freezing up.

(Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

The company issued a statement pinpointing “a bug in the internal clock driver related to the way the device handles a leap year.”

Microsoft also said that “the issue should be resolved over the next 24 hours as the time change moves to Jan. 1, 2009.”

This year, an extra day was tacked on to February, making this a leap year. By international agreement, the world’s timekeepers are also adding a “leap second” tonight to keep Earth apace with very precise clocks.

The internal clocks on what is known as the Zune 30 should reset at noon GMT on Thursday, the company said. After that, 30-gigabyte Zune users should follow these three steps:

* Let the battery die.
* Recharge it.
* Turn the device on.

Zune Pass subscribers may need to sync their devices with their PCs to “refresh the rights to the subscription content you have downloaded to your device,” according to Microsoft’s statement.

Users of the 30GB model began reporting problems on a Microsoft message board early Wednesday (Dec. 31). Customers similarly are saying that their digital music players get stuck on the Zune logo screen as it appears to load, and efforts to unjam the device are mostly fruitless.