Can't delete ical account

Question

I tried unsuccessfully to find a solution to this issue on the web but the only thing that seemed to keep popping up was issues with Mobile Me and synching.
My problem was with a 10.6.8 client trying to connect to a 10.6.8 iCal server. Tried creating the account like I've done hundreds of times before and the account would not take the user's password. That is I would get an iCal error message when opening iCal that the username or password was incorrect. Looking at iCal preferences there was, indeed, no password entered. If I entered the user's password it would simply disappear when I went to another pane in the Preferences window - then throw the same error message. The account pane also listed duplicate iCal accounts - both of which, as stated below, we tried to delete.
Creating a new user account and then creating the iCal account worked just fine. So clearly there was corruption in the original account. I suspected there was a problem with the Keychain, but deleting the keychain and recreating it didn't work, repairing the keychain didn't work. Even trying to delete the iCal account would not work because no sooner was the account deleted in iCal preferences but it reappeared (like magic).
We tried deleting preference files, cache files, almost any file we could find with "ical" in it - all to no avail. The problem persisted like a bad cold.
The only solution I found was to completely delete the user account and create a new one - log her onto the network - then turn her account into a Mobile account (so she could log in to the laptop at home) - and recreate her Mail and iCal accounts. Fortunately she didn't have any user files as she is a new teacher, but even if she did, I would have copied those files off to an external drive and moved them back to the new account. I'd also propagate permissions on those files so that there would be no problems with her accessing them in the new account.
Of course she'd lose any preferences she had set up, but I've done this type of thing before and losing preferences is a small price to pay for having things run correctly in the first place.
As far as the original problem was concerned, I suspect some sort of corruption when she initially logged onto the network to change her password. I still don't have a good method of doing that for new users...a work in progress.
Hope this helps someone if they have a similar issue. Maybe some of you gurus out there have a solution to this issue, but I don't think so. Between Tech Support and Google we tried about every option available.

Answer 1

Try an iPhone reset, which is done by pressing and holding the home button and the sleep/wake or on/off button simultaneously until you see the Apple logo and then release - ignoring the slide to turn off prompt when doing so.
After your iPhone has restarted, try turning Calendars off for over the air syncing with your MM account on your iPhone followed by turning Calendars back on.