Did not really work.... I think there is a bug but I cannot remember all the various pages I visited trying to understand why this will not work....

AAAnyways I read somewhere that this problem (the system times out waiting for a tick from the HW clock) is fixed in 2.6.25 so I tried and everything is back to normal again. Only to remember that it is not much recommended for noobs like me to use odd Kernel versions......

The only way to get sense of my HW clock (in 2.6.24) is by issuing the --directisa option. I thought maybe to add it in the hwclock.sh script but got scared.....

Anyway, all is well so far with the new Kernel so I'm just going to drop this...