desktop powers on by itself when power strip is turned on?

My father-in-laws desktop (running 98) powers on by itself when he turns the the power strip on. Then a BIOS black screen comes up asking him to ESC to Run SETUP. He presses ESC and then has to reset the date (defaults to 01/01/2001 and the time (00:00:00). Any help would be very useful? My techies here said to simply run a Win 98 repair? Thanks in advance.