Backup Policy Runs, But Not at Scheduled Time - Anyone Seen This?

[dale_m1]

I have been unable to get a backup policy to run at the proper scheduled time.  Here is the situation;
 
I have seven servers.  I have an active backup policy on the Management Console applied to all seven servers.  The policy is scheduled to do run at 9pm on T,W,H,F,S of every week with a new baseline backup being done on the 1^st and 15^th of the month. If I look at the backup policy on the management console it says the next backup will run at 9:00pm.  If I start up BESR 2010 locally on each server and look at the schedule on the Status screen, it also tells me the next scheduled backup is 9pm.  However, the backups do not run at 9pm, rather they run at 1am. 
 

In trying to understand this, it appears that the Altiris agent pulls down backup policy to a local XML file located at;
 
C:\Program Files\Altiris\Altiris Agent\Client Policies
 
In turn, the local BESR installation appears to pull a portion of this file into its own XML file (.pqj extension) located at;
 
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Symantec\Backup Exec System Recovery\Schedule
 
 
In the Altiris XML, in the “Start New Recovery Point Set” section, there is a tag as follows (which appears to be correct);
 
<StartDateTimeLocal type="System.DateTime">3/26/2010 9:00:00 PM</StartDateTimeLocal>
 
 
In the BESR XML, in the “Recovery Point Schedule” section, there are a couple tags as follows;
 
<StartDateTime vt="7">3/27/2010 1: 0:10</StartDateTime>
<RepeatHourEndTime vt="7">3/27/2010 1: 0: 0</RepeatHourEndTime>
 
I saw something elsewhere on the web that suggests the Symantec XML is using GMT time formatting, which, if true, would mean the two XML lines above are correct.  If the Symantec XML is using local time (EST), then this could well be the source of the error.
 

The problem though is, as previously stated, if I fire up the BESR locally on any of these seven servers, they all tell me, on the Status screen that the next scheduled run time is 9pm.
 
So, why is this backup policy continuing to execute at 1am?
 
I have spent a significant amount of time trying to get some kind of reliable, predictable behavior out of this Symantec/Altiris Management Console.  So far, the return on my investment has not been very favorable.  If anyone has any thoughts/recommendations on the above they would be greatly appreciated.
 
I’ll write a separate post describing the desktop policy scheduling weirdness.