While the upgrade to Leopard has overall been a great thing, as with any OS upgrade, there have been some issues. Many of these I listed in my Leopard Observations post. But the most annoying and persistent has been that of iCal not firing off any reminder alarms. I rely heavily on these to remind me of meetings and conference calls and not having the reminders has been a huge pain in the ass. And I’m not the only one with this issue.

I was hoping that the first Leopard point release 10.5.1 would solve this (and other) issues, but it hasn’t. After a couple of quick tests, alarms still aren’t firing… then rage ensues. After taking a deep breath and doing a little digging into the iCal library support files, I discovered two glimmers of hope. alarmsCache.plist and notifications.plist. These two files are located in the /Library/Application Support/iCal directory. After removing these files and restarting iCal, my reminder alarms have miraculously sprung back to life. Hallelujah! I don’t think these files are anything more that cache and preference files, but you never know. So remove at your own risk.

I post this for anyone else suffering from this bug in hopes that it will save you some sanity.

Update: Nevermind. After fixing this several times, after a few days it just reverts back to not working. If anyone has a definitive fix, please let me know.