ICal runs really slowly and unpredictably....

Question

Following the recent 10.4.6 update, my iCal is now running really slowly. I recently shift-clicked about 40 entries to delete, and all I got was the spinning wheel for an hour. I eventually force quit. I never had an issue with the speed of ical before, but now I contantly seem to get the spinning wheel.
Any ideas on how to speed things up? My ical isn't full to the gunwhales, half a dozen calendars that's all. I am also having terrible trouble with .mac syncing across my two computers, (also slow and prone to crashing - and a constant revolving arrow icon in the menu bar).
Anyone else with these troubles?

Answer 1

I followed swissmac99's instructions at
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa;jsessionid=ar2_I-abaAb7UgrAfR?messageID =1931219&#1931219
and it solved the problem for me. I suggest you backup your calendars first. NOTE that they Apple have moved storage location in the later versions from ~/Library/Calendars to ~/Library/Application Support/iCal, so backup both folders to be safe.
Here they are swissmac99's instructions:
-export all local calendars
-delete all local calendars (create and leave an empty one in ical, because it needs at least one)
-delete all subscribed calendars (store the adresses in a file)
-close ical
-delete these files:
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iCal.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iCal.alarmsCache.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iCal.AlarmScheduler.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iCal.helper.plis
-deactivate .mac synchronisation in preferences
-repair permissions
-restart computer
-open ical
-import previousliy exported calendars
-subscribe to calendars again