ICal Events Vanished - Cannot Quit iCal

Question

I loaded up iCal today and all of my events had disappeared. I can click forward and backward in time, and still, nothing. The mini-calendar in the lower left shows January 2001. There are no calendars on the left, even though I have five or six. When I try to quit iCal the program just hangs, and I have to force quit the software.
Reminders are still popping up, and my iPhone still has the events, so I think they're there, but not visible... Or something.
I've tried grabbing the calendar folder via Time Machine from a week ago, but it didn't improve. I've resynched with the iPhone, but again, no events.
How can I get my calendars back, any suggestions?

Answer 1

Same story here, though not on all of our machines. The problem affects a MacBook Pro syncing iCal via mobileme. The following procedure did not fix:
delete ical.app
reboot
empty trash for good measure
install ical from optional installs - should say that it is going to install rather than upgrade
reboot for good measure
The console shows this error repeatedly:
iCal[179] *Assertion failure in -[CoreTask OutlineView _uncachedRectHeightOfRow:], /SourceCache/AppKit/AppKit-949.43/TableView.subproj/NSTableView.m:1574
iCal[179] rowHeight must be > 0
iCal[179] rowHeight must be > 0
Tried changing /Library/Caches/Metadata/iCal to NOT.iCal in case cached data was the problem. No luck. Same with /Users/$USER/Library/Caches/com.apple.ical.
I then moved /Users/$USER/Library/Calendars to NOT.Calendars. After doing that, iCal "upgraded calendars", resync'd (sanc?) with mobileme, and worked.
Of the log file entries that went by during the last step, the following seemed interesting, though might not be related as they seem more to do with sync:
iCalExternalSync[547] Lock Contention on CalendarStore Initialization
(lots of Failed to look up record with Id: blahblahblah)
ConflictResolver[556] Ignoring exception NSObjectNotAvailableException trying to remove lock file: Can't remove existing lock for /Users/$USER/Library/Application Support/SyncServices/Local/conflicts