Fix an iCal hang due to system date reset

Feb 17, '05 09:32:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

A few nights ago, the battery fell out of the bottom of my TiBook 400 while it was asleep, resulting in a complete system reset. This left the system date set to 12/31/1969 on restart, and I've got iCal set to launch automatically on login.

After realizing the problem, I fixed the date settings and restarted. When iCal came back up, it immediately put up an empty alert window and hung, pegging the CPU. I believe it may have been trying to alert me to every event in my calendar since I started keeping it. Force-quitting iCal and restarting it just produced the same scenario over and over again.

After some poking around, I finally found the cure: in your user's Library/Preferences/com.apple.iCal.plist file, there is an entry named lastHearBeatDate (yes, it's Hear not Heart). Its value was a date string that looked like this:

19691231T224444-0800
I corrected it to somewhere near the right time (20050213T224444-0800), saved the edited plist file, and started iCal. Everything has been fine since.

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