I've also seen this on Solaris clients when accessing files on a Linux fileserver, when the dates were outrageously wrong on the file. Like a year of 1935!
The filer sync's to our stratum-2 NTP server. Since "ls -l" was giving that error and not reporting anything, I'm not sure if the date was screwy one way or another, but neither the logs on the Solaris host nor on the filer indicate that anybody has been messing with the time.
The file dates can be set arbitrarily. Our users routinely manage to set file dates back as far as 1904. The file timestamp is a 32 bit signed integer. The value zero corresponds to Jan 1, 1970 00:00 GMT. Negative values take you back before then. I suspect it is a problem where folks create files on a PC with the time set totally wrong. Then they zip up the files and unzip them on the filer, which preserves the bogus timestamps. Or else it's a bug in zip, unzip, or some other file archiving software.
Steve Losen scl@virginia.edu phone: 804-924-0640
University of Virginia ITC Unix Support