Seems like some miss communiaction. Does your CM11A work when you use it with the standard software? Since you cannot set any serial settings, maybe you have some spikes in your powerline. Just guessing here.
Unfortunately I cannot load the ActiveHome software - it locks up my machine so bad that Remote Desktop completely freezes and even PsKill takes about 20 minutes to execute the kill command on the ActiveHome process. I've always had this problem with ActiveHome; it might be a compatibility problem with Windows Server 2003.
However, despite this ActiveHome problem, Housebot has always worked perfectly for me. This is the first time I've tried using it in over a year though... it's possible that my CM11a is busted....
Do you know of any other way to set the clock? Oh, and I did put fresh batteries in.
Make sure you are running at least the Meedio version of HouseBot. Anything before that may not include the logic to set the clock automatically from the plugin.
Make sure you restart HouseBot after you have changed the batteries.
The only other way I can think to set the clock is to run ActiveHome on another machine and set the CM11a there and then move it back to the HouseBot machine.