(IDG) -- More bad news on the year-2000 front was released Tuesday -- this time in a survey of what major U.S. companies are doing to ready software on distributed desktops for the date rollover. Many haven't done much, it seems.

Companies have been focused on centralized and mainframe applications but have largely ignored desktop software applications, according to the research sponsored by Tangram Enterprise Solutions, which sells year-2000 risk assessment and services to companies and government agencies. The Cameron School of Business at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and Giga Information Group also participated in the survey; the results were outlined Tuesday during a teleconference.

Most older software programs were written with two-digit date fields expected to interpret the "00" in 2000 as "1900" and subsequently fail to make correct calculations.

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The survey discussed in Tuesday's teleconference included 449 Fortune 1000 companies. Although 90 percent said they expect to have desktop applications that function properly by Jan. 1, 2000, many lack up-to-date inventories of exactly what end-users have on their PCs.

"The one thing the survey says to me is that there is a massive disconnect between what people say they are doing with Y2K and what they are actually doing with Y2K," said Chris Jesse, president and chief executive officer of Tangram.

The majority of companies surveyed said that year 2000 is a top priority at the board level, but Jesse said that boards of directors might be led to believe that corporations are doing more than actually is occurring in the trenches, particularly given the lack of inventories of desktop applications.

"What the board hears may not actually be what's happening," Jesse said. "It's impossible to mitigate problems on the desktop if you don't know what the desktops have on them."

Until recently, companies have assumed that end-users would deal with year-2000 issues related to desktops, but the realization has been dawning that many critical decisions are made by employees working on desktops rather than on mainframe or system applications, said Stephanie Moore, a Giga analyst.

Of the survey respondents, 34 percent said they do not conduct inventories of desktop applications, and more than 60 percent said inventories are taken annually or less often. Now that more focus is going to desktops and how well they meet operational requirements for the year 2000, the lack of inventories will hamper progress.

"Very few people have an inventory that is meaningful," Moore said. "A one-year-old inventory of the desktop is only slightly better than no inventory at all."

End-users tend to add and delete desktop applications often, making frequent inventories necessary to keep tabs on what software is being used. Moreover, even when companies take steps to update desktop applications so that they will handle post-1999 dates properly, end-users might inadvertently derail efforts by adding software that is not year-2000-ready, Jesse said.

Some 65 percent of companies responding to the survey have not calculated the cost of making desktop machines ready as part of year-2000 budgets, and therefore have no way to know if money set aside to deal with the millennium software bug will be enough.

"We're going to have a huge hidden expense that these folks are facing," Jesse said.

Nancy Weil is a Boston correspondent for the IDG News Service, an InfoWorld affiliate.