Okay, this could well be the wrong component... but it's as close as I can figure out :) The writes to utmp done by gnome-pty-helper when called by gnome-terminal appear to be incorrect. The login time seems to be set to the beginning of the epoch rather than the current time. Witness (additional indenting for clarity) [root@testbox i386]# w 10:05pm up 1:49, 9 users, load average: 1.13, 1.28, 1.23 USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT katzj pts/0 :0 31Dec69 20:04 0.34s 0.09s screen katzj pts/1 :0 31Dec69 0.00s 1.16s ? - katzj pts/2 :0 31Dec69 52:52 4.62s 0.25s vi w.c katzj pts/3 :0 31Dec69 48.00s 10.14s 10.01s slogin cosanost katzj pts/4 - 9:15pm 20:04 0.81s 0.14s rpm -ba SPECS/k katzj pts/5 - 9:15pm 21:00 0.09s 0.09s /bin/bash katzj pts/6 - 9:33pm 30:45 0.26s 0.21s slogin morpheus katzj pts/7 :0 31Dec69 2:28 0.41s ? - ptys 4, 5, and 6 are from screen while the others are from gnome-terminal. Xterm works properly. And since gnome-terminal never directly writes utmp itself, but has gnome-pty-helper do it, it looks like gnome-pty-helper is the culprit
This was a patch applied to fix a warning that messed up the times utmp. Warning fixed properly in gnome-libs-1.0.55-8, by fixing up configure problems.
*** Bug 9483 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***