Rich's Tongfamily

I’ve had terrible problems with both iCal and Entourage. With iCal, I first tried to use Google Calendar and then started deleting excessive calendars. Then, when I rebooted, I discovered that I couldn’t see any calendars and also that when I tried to add another calendar with New calendar, iCal just hung.

First thing to do when this happens is to start the Console (go to spotlight at upper right and type _console_ and in the search box, type “ical”. I saw right away there was an “Coredata uncaught exception” so something was wrong. A little research showed Coredata are the internal Apple library for managing databases, so it sure feels like a database corruption. First thing to do is to try to reset iCal

Apple – Support – Discussions – How do I completely reset iCal? …

How do I completely reset iCal? I want a really clean startup situation as if iCal has never run on this account. I tried:

rm -rf ~/Library/{Caches,Caches/Metadata,Preferences,Application\ Support}/*iCal*

but when I start iCal after that I get still a calendar mentioned (which I created a while back but is empty) besides Home and Work. I tried removing as above and logging out and in but that also did not work

Unfortunately, this is not quite correct. There is another database called ~/Library/Calendars which is your list of all calendar data. This what was corrupt which is why there was no left pane. There is a problem. Delete these many files and all is really reset.

Now Entourage somehow decided to take one recurring Birthday and make it a daily event spanning 46 years and then repeat that every year. Didn’t appear in Exchange, so this was something in the Entourage not liking what it saw in Exchange. Solution is to complete wide Entourage. Even a database rebuild (in Spotlight, search for Microsoft Database Utility) didn’t help. So you have to go to Account Settings and delete the offending and reinstall. Also delete in ~/Library/Microsoft all the Entourage databases.