This bug was reported in our internal bug tracker and assigned to me.
 At first, I disagreed that it was a bug but surprisingly there exist users who are running into this problem. We are making images for using in Vmware, and we don't know beforehand what time zone uses the client who installed image. So we are assuming that BIOS time is in UTC. But VMware hypervisor sets BIOS time to the local time! It can't be changed judging by googling results and reading several discussions on the subject.  The operating system starts up in Moscow (UTC +3), then interfaces are being brought up by usage of dhclient, then goes NTP synchronization - and time goes back on three hours. With short leases, it leads to the bringing ifaces down.
 
  I've made two solutions with gettimeofday() replacements: using LD_PRELOAD and other solution using direct compile-in replacements. Both of the solutions were quickly approved by our corporative code review. I've even put the somewhat simpler LD_PRELOAD hack on public githup.  So it is not a problem for now, but it will be cool to know that someday it will be properly fixed in some future version.

 Now I am going to nicely blame our support QA now by rephrasing your words that from 1993 there wasn't any person except them who bumped into this problem.