Timer Jobs, Alerts and the Daylight Savings Time Hotfix

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Timer Jobs, Alerts and the Daylight Savings Time Hotfix

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Not too long ago I had a problem with MOSS timer jobs delaying execution until an hour after they were created.  I was puzzled, as the farm I was working on was a clean install of slipstreamed SP1.  After some searching, I found the KB941422 post-SP1 hotfix.  The install was no walk in the park – it was as intrusive as a service pack, forcing me to bring down every server in the farm – but once it was in place my timer jobs started behaving themselves.
 
Just a couple of days ago during the SharePoint After Hours event someone asked me about a problem they were having with alerts and task notifications disappearing in pre-SP1 site collections.  They had tried every method they could find on the web to get the alerts working again (including all the alerts-enabled and job-immediate-alerts STSADM tricks) to no avail.  Thankfully, they took the time to write up a lengthy description of the problem and buried in the middle of the list of issues was a sentence that said:
 
"…alert notification didn’t come in ’til about 1 hr after I created the task…"
 
Well, that certainly rang a bell.  So I suggested the KB941422 DST hotfix and what do you know?  Alerts came back to life and all was well.
 
Moral of the story?  Get those hotfixes and apply ’em pronto.  You never know when they might save you hours of frustration.
 
UPDATE:  Kim Nguyen has more detailed information on this issue here.