ICal invite field types wrong characters

Question

After upgrading from OS X 10.5.8 to 10.6.8-1.1 I can no longer invite people to events in iCal, when I start typing an email address within the invitee field the character I am typing changes to a different character. This is the only field that I have experienced this behavior in. I have upgraded other users within our organization from Leopard to Snow Leopard without any issue, so the trouble appears to be based on something specific to the users account, because the results are inconsistent. I have not created a test user account, nor have I tried booting this computer in safe mode. But will try when I have access to this computer and then update this post. Has anyone else experienced this?

Answer 1

Okay, so after spending several hours with Apple tech support I was able to resolve my problem, hope this helps. The user had manually synced their Address Book contacts with their iPhone and a Google contacts list. Both of these syncs as well as manually adding new contacts into the Address Book on their iMac caused the Address Book to get completely scrambled. The user had cards with no title, but as many as five (unrelated) email addresses assigned to the card. This same Address Book contained multiple address cards like this, yet each one was slightly different. The user also had cards with titles containing special characters (&;?-_/   etc.), the quick answer for me was, the user had o go through their Address Book on their iPhone and their iMac and completely descramble the bad data. Then before a fresh sync they had to turnoff sync with Google contacts within iTunes. Once the bad data was removed the invitee field with iCal immediately started to perform as expected without fail. What a relief to have this issue resolved.