Unable to purchase from UK kindle store (2nd Gen)

I’m having a problem purchasing from the Kindle Store in the UK with my 2nd generation kindle (3G).

My account was originally with US store then moved to the UK store not too long after Amazon opened the UK store.

The message I get is “The Kindle store is currently unavailable. Please try again later.” I can still download already purchased content from both the US & UK stores, so it just means I have to buy via my computer and don’t get access to the limited Prime lending library.

My attempts to fix this by speaking to Amazon UK gets the answer speak to Amazon US it’s a hardware problem, speaking to Amazon US gets the answer speak to Amazon UK it’s an account problem (after being walked through factory default resets etc by both support desks).

What I have noticed (annoyingly after speaking to Amazon) is that the time is out by an hour on the Kindle. Changing network by typing ‘311’ on the setup page doesn’t seem to fix this. I’m pretty sure the last thing I purchased via the kindle was on the 3rd of May so I’m not sure if my store problems are related to summer time.

Using @time in the search box displays the time zone as being British Summer Time but out by an hour. The 611 page displays the time as the current local time with a local time offset of +1h.

So my questions are as follows:

a) Is the incorrect time likely to be the reason the Amazon store won’t let me connect?

b) If you can’t get to the store when the clock is wrong what can I do to correct it?