Being “ahead” is a clear indicator of a problem … the processing of your requests might be delayed for up to 6 minutes in this case.
However, it is really interesting that a sync did not solve your problem. Which indicates there are other issues involved.
If I were in your situation then I would:
- A) check if the OS time zone is correct (a time sync will not resolve that)
- … a wrong timezone can delay you for hours
- B) Record a launch with … Process Monitor … and try to find which server connections are causing those delays.
When I did my “clock out-of-sync” tests then B) was easy to find because it resulted in unusually high connect-disconnect events for a specific host … as the sim (client) will run into a timeout and will try to “heal” the server connection by reconnecting (which as a result leads to the “denial-of-service” condition on the server, if this happens for 10,000 users).
But I can understand that B) may not be what you want to spend your hours with. But at this point it is all that I can think of.