Calendar has multiple copies of repeating events

Question

This is just ridiculous. Just about any repeating event fills up the calendar with multiple copies of itself. I'm rapidly losing faith in the calendar's usefulness. This doesn't seem to be a problem with items that existed before I upgraded to iOS4.
Can anyone tell me what is happening? I've given up syncing the phone with MobileMe as there seems to a limit of 6 calendars.
My Apple experience is going sour - hope someone can help.

Answer 1

Suddenly on Lion on my new MBA, calendars would start duplicating themselves, every few seconds. I might have a calendar on MobileMe called "Cal1", and it and its events would start mulitplying, so on a Monday where it said "Eat Breakfast" (silly example), I would get 2 of them - then a few seconds later 3 of them (with a whole new calendar also called "Cal1"), and it just kept on growing. I went to iCal, Preferences, Accounts, and I could see them adding themselves in there too, faster than I could delete them.
This was only on my MBA. I am also syncing two other Macs and and iPhone, and they were fine, as was the web-based calendar at MobileMe.
I read around the Net and it was not helping, but I went right back to basics and deleted the plist file for iCal. That stopped it immediately, and over the last few days it's been fine.
Here's how:
I turned off my wireless Internet connection (and the calendars stopped replicating);
I went into my Library folder (which in Lion, which now hides that folder, means that in Finder I went to the Go menu, then "Go to Folder" and typed in "~/Library", and it then appears in Finder under your "User Folder");
in Library, open the Preferences folder;
I found everything in there which said "iCal" in it, and moved them all to some other folder (on the Desktop, for example), in case I needed to put them back later; i.e. they were saved, but effectively deleted from Preferences.
After that, iCal settled right down, and behaved totally normally.
I probably didn't need to delete that many files, but the ones I found were:
com.apple.iCal.plist
com.apple.iCal.helper.plist
com.apple.iCal.Alarm.plist
other apparently "temporary" files like com.apple.iCal.helper.ED60A...plist
and most of these had associated ".lockfile" files (a new[?] thing in Lion) which I read about and then also deleted;
I did not delete com.apple.iCal.help.
Upon restarting iCal and/or re-syncing it, all of these files reappeared immediately, all of my calendars were back (they're stored somewhere else and were ready to go, on my computer), and everthing was cool.
I hate to think how it would have gone had I not been a bit(?) geeky.
Charles