Entourage causes iCal crash and won't not sync :-(

[stephen.riehm]

Hi,

today I installed the 11.2.3 Office update and decided to try the new
"sync with Addressbook and iCal" features. Addressbook seems to have
accepted the data OK, but iCal crashes and has become completely
unusable :-(

Entourage added itself to the Sync Services profile and then created a
new "entourage" calendar in iCal. iCal displayed most of the entries
for the month displayed, and then I was prompted to solve a few
conflicts. The dialog box told me that the conflicts would be fixed
with the next sync and gave me the option to sync now or later. I chose
to sync now and iCal promptly vanished.

Since then, iCal takes about a minute to get up and running, but then
as soon as the entourage calendar entries are displayed, it crashes
again.

The console log has the following to say about the crashes:
2006-03-16 14:21:22.733 iCal[456] *** trying to add nil node to group
<CALNamedGroupNode: 0x6e774b0>
2006-03-16 14:21:46.263 iCal[456] SyncServices precondition failure in
[ISyncConcreteSession
clientAcceptedChangesForRecordWithIdentifier:formattedRecord:newRecordIdentifier:]:
you can't change the record identifier from
com.apple.syncservices:60E6E337-9AFD-47A0-B046-9A5FA21D855C to
CalendarED3B6BD-BBA9-4336-9A8C-9F64C3510D8E/Event:6298C2FA-44C9-4E0F-9D2E-8EEBB09260F2/Attendee:[email protected]:
it is already associated with a different record.
Mar 16 14:22:01 hsewks590 /Applications/iCal.app/Contents/MacOS/iCal:
objc: FREED(id): message repository sent to freed object=0x97616c0
Mar 16 14:22:02 hsewks590 crashdump[459]: iCal crashed
Mar 16 14:22:03 hsewks590 crashdump[459]: crash report written to:
/Users/srie/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/iCal.crash.log
2006-03-16 14:29:46.365 iCal Helper[473] *** trying to add nil node to
group <CALNamedGroupNode: 0x2d54210>

OK, since syncing obviously doesn't work for me, now I want to simply
turn it off.
I first changed Entourage's Preferences, and deleted the entourage
calendar from iCal. But even after rebooting, entourage automatically
syncs with iCal, creating a new "entourage" calendar if I had deleted
it, and crashing iCal as above. Even deleting ~/Library/Sync Services/
doesn't stop Entourage from Syncing. It just re-enables itself all the
time.

So I have two questions:
Is there a way to solve this problem?
and does anyone know how to REALLY turn Entourage's syncing off?

Thanks in advance,

Steve

 

[Andy Ruff]

On the iCal crash--be sure to submit the crash log to Apple.

On turning synching off: is the pref disabled in Entourage? If you look at
Activity Monitor, is there an app called "Microsoft Sync" running (or runs
when you modify something in the Entourage calendar in iCal)?

If both of these are FALSE, then Entourage is definitely not synching with
Sync Services. The Microsoft Sync daemon runs whenever you enable Sync
Services in Entourage and we receive a notification that a change has
happened--it handles all the synching between the OS' Sync Services system
and the Microsoft Database Daemon. It won't always be running, just when a
change happens, it'll launch, sync the change, and then quit (you can see it
in action by modifying a contact in Address Book with Address Book synching
enabled in Entourage). This allows Entourage to continue to synch changes
even when the Entoruage application is not running.

If the Microsoft Sync daemon never launches, there's no way for Entourage to
sync data with Sync Services. The preferences in Entourage for Sync
Services basically control 1) if this daemon app is launched and 2) where it
should sync data to-from.

-Andy

--
Andy Ruff
MacBU Program Management
Entourage Weblog: http://blogs.msdn.com/entourage/

This posting is provided ³AS IS² with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Hi,

today I installed the 11.2.3 Office update and decided to try the new
"sync with Addressbook and iCal" features. Addressbook seems to have
accepted the data OK, but iCal crashes and has become completely
unusable :-(

Entourage added itself to the Sync Services profile and then created a
new "entourage" calendar in iCal. iCal displayed most of the entries
for the month displayed, and then I was prompted to solve a few
conflicts. The dialog box told me that the conflicts would be fixed
with the next sync and gave me the option to sync now or later. I chose
to sync now and iCal promptly vanished.

Since then, iCal takes about a minute to get up and running, but then
as soon as the entourage calendar entries are displayed, it crashes
again.

The console log has the following to say about the crashes:
2006-03-16 14:21:22.733 iCal[456] *** trying to add nil node to group
<CALNamedGroupNode: 0x6e774b0>
2006-03-16 14:21:46.263 iCal[456] SyncServices precondition failure in
[ISyncConcreteSession
clientAcceptedChangesForRecordWithIdentifier:formattedRecord:newRecordIdentifi
er:]:
you can't change the record identifier from
com.apple.syncservices:60E6E337-9AFD-47A0-B046-9A5FA21D855C to
CalendarED3B6BD-BBA9-4336-9A8C-9F64C3510D8E/Event:6298C2FA-44C9-4E0F-9D2E-8E
EBB09260F2/Attendee:[email protected]:
it is already associated with a different record.
Mar 16 14:22:01 hsewks590 /Applications/iCal.app/Contents/MacOS/iCal:
objc: FREED(id): message repository sent to freed object=0x97616c0
Mar 16 14:22:02 hsewks590 crashdump[459]: iCal crashed
Mar 16 14:22:03 hsewks590 crashdump[459]: crash report written to:
/Users/srie/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/iCal.crash.log
2006-03-16 14:29:46.365 iCal Helper[473] *** trying to add nil node to
group <CALNamedGroupNode: 0x2d54210>

OK, since syncing obviously doesn't work for me, now I want to simply
turn it off.
I first changed Entourage's Preferences, and deleted the entourage
calendar from iCal. But even after rebooting, entourage automatically
syncs with iCal, creating a new "entourage" calendar if I had deleted
it, and crashing iCal as above. Even deleting ~/Library/Sync Services/
doesn't stop Entourage from Syncing. It just re-enables itself all the
time.

So I have two questions:
Is there a way to solve this problem?
and does anyone know how to REALLY turn Entourage's syncing off?

Thanks in advance,

Steve

 

[stephen.riehm]

Thanks Andy,

First off, the bad news is that I can't verify this any more.
The symptoms yesterday were that the sync preference was turned off in
entourage, I would try to start iCal, it would get up and running and
then try to load the entourage calendar and crash(you can see the
calendars appear one after another - I have about 20, the entourage was
the last to appear). I would delete the entourage calendar from iCal as
soon as it appeared, but the next time iCal started, after a short
delay it would re-appear. What was happening in the background I cannot
begin to speculate. At one point I had two entourage calendars in iCal.

The good news is that I got around this problem by changing the sync
calendar in entourage via the sync services preference pane. This time,
instead of choosing the default (merge), I chose "replace entourage
items with sync service items" option. Boom it worked, by DELETING
EVERYTHING from my entourage calendar.

So now it works, new events from either side get synced in both
directions, but I can't say that I'm happy.

At the very least the sync options should be reworded! I had hoped that
"replace items" meant overwriting conflicting items - avoiding the need
to manually handle conflicts. Although, I can't imagine why it thought
there were any conflicts in the first place! The entourage calendar in
iCal didn't exist before I turned the syncing mechanism on - it should
have been a simple copy from entourage to iCal.

Steve