@Mario Beck

Which language do you use ? Is the publish start date changing every time you save an item?

I am using the English language.
No not every time, only when I create a new item

@Mario Beck

So to summarize, every time you create a new item it get's pending by it's own? I tried to reproduce the issue with no luck. Do you have any third-party K2 or content plugins installed ?

Yes exactly,
i need to open the item again and set the date manually, even if it is already correct. It's not possible to click the on the pending button in the overview to change the status to active.

No 3Party Addons..

What's your timezone setting under Joomla! configuration? The only thing i can think is that the issue is coming from server setup. You said you are usign IIS... Have you another machine to test on a linux server? Or try Apache server on Windows. I really don't know what else can cause this since you verify that you are running Joomla! 3.2.2 and K2 2.6.8.

Hi

TimeZone Joomla: Europe/Berlin
TimeZone Server: Europe/Berlin
TimeZone PHP ini: Europe/Berlin

What I've just found out is.. when I create a new item the current time is shown. When I click on save, i can see under Created that one hour has been added and that's the reason the item is being set on pending.
Example:
New Item Test..
Shown Time/Date: 26th February 11:41 etc

Click on Save
Created/Date: 26th February 12:41

Maybe this is due to the change between German summer and wintertime? ;-)
Really really strange.. btw i am experiencing the same issue on Apache/XAMPP

I changed my Joomla! (3.2.2) timezone to Europe/Berlin and still works fine for me. So sorry to ask again, but are you completely sure that you are using a recent download of the K2 development version? You can grab it from getk2.org/assets/get/. Also i assume that you are using the English language in administration as you already wrote.

Did some troubleshooting.. here are the results

First of all i've checked if the regular joomla articles/categories are still accessable and found out that the category manager is not langer accessable with the following error message

Fatal error: Call to undefined method CategoriesHelper::getActions() in C:\inetpub\wwwroot\joomla\administrator\components\com_categories\views\categories\view.html.php on line 106

line 106:
// Get the results for each action.
$canDo = CategoriesHelper::getActions($component, $categoryId);

This will get important later..

Next step.. installed the latest dev build (again) without uninstalling K2 before
Issue still occurs!

Uninstalled K2 and installed your latest dev version..
issue is gone.. item is published directly and this would mean it is solved BUT
of course all my items and categories i have created before have gone and i cant access the joomla category manager.. do you have a workaround how i can save my already created items/categories?

thank you

Obviously something is wrong with your setup. The Fatal error in categories manager comes from the core Joomla!. This makes me think that probably updates are not applied correctly in your system ( both K2 and Joomla! updates ) and that's the issue causing all this. Check again your server file permissions. Maybe Joomla! cannot override some files and the update installs partially.

i've setup a brand new joomla site and copied the content from my old installation.. everything is working fine now.. it was a night without sleep but all fine now..
thank you very much for your effort!