I thought there was a food bug that caused your player to become ravenous, requiring you to feed him all the food you saved in your inventory, then run out of food and die in the span of about 40 seconds. Turns out, the numberpad * key speeds up time, and the numberpad / slows it back down. My install of Fraps is bound to * for the FPS display, so I wound up hitting this key a few times to bounce the FPS counter around and then subsequentlly ran out of time on all my quests, ate all my food and died. This game can be very frustrating.
I believe this was removed in the first patch ... maybe I'm wrong as I never installed the patch as I had gotten a fair bit into the game and done some heavy modding.
Didn't you notice the weather changing rather rapidly ?
There was no documentation of those keys and what they did with the game so ... as you did ... many people thought it was a bug.
It was a bit of a pain with the first FOV tool as it also used those keys ... Racer_S changed it be cause of the problem.
Anyway ... I hope your frustrations are ended now you know about the keys ... :D