>>>>By later experiments I found that if I have SET DATE LONG or SET DATE SHORT or SET DATE DMY / MDY / YMD
>>>>
>>>>then the SET HOURS settings are ignored. If I use SET DATE USA (or any other setting), then SET HOURS are respected by the displayed value.
>>>
>>>It does make sense for SET DATE LONG and SET DATE SHORT as it specifies it uses the formats as configured in the control panel (implying it reads the locale information). However, I don't think the SET DATE DMY/MDY/YMD will behave the same (did quick experiement and noticed that SET DATE DMY/MDY/YMD does seem to honor the SET HOURS setting. It could've been a "side effect" of using SET DATE LONG or SET DATE SHORT that you might've observed).
>>
>>SET DATE SHORT
>>then
>>SET DATE MDY
>>
>>will not respect SET HOURS.
>
>Hrm... That's not the behavior I see. For example, I start with SET DATE AMERICAN and SET HOURS TO 24
>After setting SET DATE SHORT, I get date/time based on locale settings in Windows when I display datetime values, which is set to 12 hour clock. Regarddless of the SET HOURS, it displays 12-hour
>After using SET DATE MDY, time display honors the SET HOURS setting. In this case, it reverts to 24-hour format.

May be I got confused in that many tests I ran. Seems like only SET DATE SHORT/LONG don't respect SET HOURS.