setting time zone: Big problem with KDE ! This must be a bug

I installed Knoppix in North America, then moved to central Europe. Although I change timezone settings, the greeter screen always show time for EDT. I change the timezone setting to CEST in KDE, but upon reboot it is changed back to EDT.

I have

peter@PBPhome:~$ tzconfig
Your current time zone is set to Europe/Zurich
Do you want to change that? [n]: n
Your time zone will not be changed
peter@PBPhome:~$ hwclock
Thu Jul 21 11:31:41 2005 -0.891775 seconds
peter@PBPhome:~$ date
Thu Jul 21 05:32:16 EDT 2005

I can change the date manually with date MMDDhhmm, and change the timezone and time settings in KDE to reflect the local timezone and time. Nonetheless, upon reboot the time zone is always EDT, according to KDE and date but not tzconfig, and system time has always been reset to the time zone listed by KDE. Anyone who has moved to another time zone after a Knoppix install must have had this problem. I am using KDE 3.2.2.

Can anyone help?