FreeBSD 8.0 reboot hangs at welcome screen

[n dhert]

I have a server with VMware ESXi4 with two FreeBSD-amd64 virtual machines
(one 7.2, one 8.0).
I wanted to do a shutdown -r of the 8.0 machine.
The system when down, started 'Rebooting ..', showed the FBSD Welcome
screen, counted down 10 seconds, .. then nothing happened, waited about 5
minutes
nothing happened.
I had do power-off the Virtual Machine, then power-on and it rebooted.
After that I saw the time (date command) on that machine was 5 minutes
behind ...

Why is that?
And can the 5 minutes behind in time be caused by that 5 minute 'hang'
period?