time lag in the cloned VMs in vmware vsphere 5.x

Issue: The cloned VMs are lagging behind the source VM for 5 minutes.
cloning is currently done via powercli script.
ESXi 5.0.0 build 768111
vCenter server 5.1.0 build 799731
not all but only cloned VMs of a particular vm has this issue.

What didn't work : time synchronization with the host is turned off .
The vms are currently syncing their time with the domain controller.
Vmware tools are up to date.
Sync driver isnt present under Non-Plug and Play Drivers. In device manager.
reinstall vmware tools without the vss (volume shadow copy) and tried cloning  but no go.

the .vmx file had the following entries
tools.syncTime = "0"
If set to TRUE, the clock syncs periodically. 60 sec is by defalut

time.synchronize.continue = "0"
If set to TRUE, the clock syncs after taking a snapshot.

time.synchronize.restore = "0"
If set to TRUE, the clock syncs after reverting to a snapshot.

time.synchronize.resume.disk = "0"
If set to TRUE, the clock syncs after resuming from suspend and after migrating to a new host using the VMware vMotion feature

time.synchronize.shrink = "0"
If set to TRUE, the clock syncs after defragmenting a virtual disk.

time.synchronize.tools.startup = "0"
If set to TRUE, the clock syncs when the tools daemon starts up, normally while the guest operating system is booting

time.synchronize.resume.host = "0"
If set to TRUE, the clock syncs after the host resumes from sleep.

these parameters were defined in the cloned problematic VMs compared to the other working VMs.
This parameters are defined to disable the time synchronization completely see the article
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1189

this means the time sync with the host has been already disabled.

 the polling time was set to 3600sec which is 60 mins in the Domain Controller's registry settings. changed it back to 900 as per VMware and restarted the w32time service

What worked : turning 'sync to the host' on.