timezone: TZ not defined!

Hello,

Well, I can't get the timezone thing to work at all on my Debian linux (linux 
2.2.20, g++ 3.3.4, log4cxx  0.9.7). Not only can't I get the logger to output 
stuff with the right timestamps but while trying to determine why I have a 
problem I ran into this strange behaviour...

I write a small program that doesn't use log4cxx at all. It just takes a look 
at the value of the environment variable TZ. 

If I link with liblog4cxx.so there is a dependency (ldd tells me so - this is 
perhaps normal...) and the program tells me that TZ is not set.

If I link without the library (which, of course, is not used by my program at 
all) the program tells me that TZ is set.

I can just about live with wrong timestamps, but living with this is a little 
hard! What is going on? Any ideas - good, bad, or trivial? 

regards Allen