Troubleshoot Google Calendar Sync

All of a sudden Google Calendar Sync started to hang on my computer – and not only that, it also hung my Outlook, so I needed to kill both processes.

Looking for a solution I found that many users had the same problem, posts dated back to 2009, but I did not find a single response from Google! Apparently they don’t support this software.

Anyway, I found the tool valuable enough to go through the troubleshooting myself to get it back to work again. Here’s what worked for me, maybe this helps others:

• on XP go to C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Calendar Sync\logs, on Vista or later go to C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Google\Google Calendar Sync\logs
• create a file named level.txt, which contains the text “VERBOSE”, this enables verbose logging
• restart Calendar Synch and run it until it hangs
• look at the end of the last log file, this will hopefully indicate on which appointment the process got hung

In my case there was a problem with a recurring appointment. I deleted it and created it again with the same recurrence pattern, then it worked. You may have a different problem than me, but hopefully the above process gives you a hint what the cause may be.