iCal event description disappears

This has only been happening for the past month or so. My iCal always worked pretty flawlessly before.

Now when I manually enter a new event into iCal, I overtype the words "New Event" with a description of my new appointment. I select the time, the calendar I want it to appear in, and whether I want an alert. It looks perfect. When I'm done, it shows up in my calendar grid for that day and it still looks perfect.

All done, right? Well, not any more. Approximately 10 to 60 seconds after it appears in the grid, the description (the words that replaced New Event) disappears. The time is still blocked out on the calendar and the alert and everything is intact except that it now says "New Event." I've learned from experience that I need to wait and watch for at least a minute or two after I add an appointment to my calendar. Otherwise, I find myself with a lot of New Events blocked out on my calendar but no description of what they are. (This is very bad because then I have to pour through emails or wrack my brain to try to remember where and why I'm supposed to be somewhere on Monday morning at 9 a.m.)

I have literally watched the description revert to "New Event" right before my eyes on at least two occasions.

Events on shared calendars that are scheduled by someone else seem unaffected by this new anomaly. It's strictly events that I schedule manually. I haven't changed my entry methods or anything, so I'm really stumped about what is causing this.

I scheduled an appointment this morning and typed in the description and watched it appear in the grid. I happened to glance at the calendar a few minutes later and it said New Event. It doesn't happen every single time (which means I cannot recreate this behavior on demand), but it happens at least 50% of the time now. It's really making me afraid to trust iCal, which I depend on for my business. No one else seems to be having this problem, as far as I can tell on these boards. Is this a hardware issue?