Notifications are combined, responses from users (or techs) and private messages. The My Account main page (dashboard) breaks out what the notifications mean, 2 User Responses, 5 private messages.
The update is not dynamic, in the sense that it could take a minute or so for the notifications to update... this was done in the interest of saving resources which makes pages load faster. Granted, that one thing isn't going to make a huge difference, but it is things like this in the new code which help overhead on the server.
For example, the Open/Active question list is like this as well. Updated every minute. This way, instead of building a new open question list for every tech viewing every page reload... I build one "view" and save this into site variables which makes everything run much faster.
I will take a look at the date issues, I have seen some odd things. I think much of it is because of the difference between old code (primary site) and new code... not jiving together.