Ah...I'd forgotten about the ones that always show the time regardless of whether or not it has been set. I can see how that would get annoying.

I guess I've been lucky in that all the microwaves I've had over the last couple of decades, and the ones we had at work, do not show the time unless you've set it. My current one, which has 7 segment LEDs for the time digits, blanks all the digits, leaving just the colons. My prior one showed "--:--" if time was not set. The one before that had a graphical display and just showed blank where the time would normally go.