tar freezes my system clock

[Benjamin Rosenblum]

recently i have been experimenting with tar to do tape backups to my 
exterman scsi vxa-1 tape drive.  backups work fine and cause no 
problem.  however, when i go to restore the files from the drive my 
system clock freezes (actually it seems to cycle from .000 to .999 of 
the same second then when it hits .999 instead of going to the next 
second it reverts to the original seconds .000)...this obviously causes 
major problems with the system and even after canceling the extraction 
the problem persists.  only solution is a reboot which i normally have 
to do hard since the times for all the processes are all screwed up it 
cant figure out what to do.  please advise.