I have the same issue with times being off. I changed the time zone to London to get mine to display NY timezone correctly.
I am getting same message on two of my sites Unable to write custom rules to your .htaccess. Is this file writable? No mod is applied.
I disabled all plugins and it makes no difference. It apparently is making changes to the htaccess file however but not applying them.
Though only thing I suspect is that both of those sites files are in a wp subdirectory.
