using local time puts you in a world of pain when you try to co-ordinate systems. Windows for years couldn't correctly do dst<->utc conversion other than the current year (if rules have changed; which they did in 2004). Not sure if they fixed that in 7 or not.
When you stat having services (and clients) in multiple time zones, the only thing that makes sense is utc (unix, gmt) time - because the conversions are not always reversible, and are always more complicated among two timezones than between utc and timezones.
