I've been struggling with Google/Android since I got an HTC Droid Incredible a few months ago. AFAIK the problem is the way Google Calendar treats recurring calendar events. 1 time events seem to work OK for me. These are the observations I've made based on hours of experimenting. Google is completely annoying, maybe only slightly less annoying than Microsoft, Apple or RIM. I hope somebody finds them useful.
Google treats recurring events as a fixed ladder of events. After it is initially set up, changes to the events are resisted, especially when trying to sync changes between different platforms e.g. online to Outlook, online to phone. Once a set of recurring events is established, any changes of date or time to 1 instance breaks that instance outside of the ladder series and it becomes a stand alone event. Any subsequent modifications to the series will not affect it e.g. if you delete the rest of the series, that 1 instance will not be deleted. If any changes are made to a date or time throughout the whole series, Google treats that as deleting the old series and creating a new series. For example, you have weekly meeting on Thurs but deleted the meeting on Thanksgiving, if you change the time of the meeting for the whole series, Google will re-create the meeting you cancelled on Thanksgiving. Outlook doesn't behave like this, it recognizes individual events in a recurring series can modified but still be part of the series.
Syncing reminders. Google makes it really difficult to sync changes in recurring event reminder times to Outlook and the phone. The change is accepted online, but Outlook and the phone show the same old reminder time. For Outlook and the phone you can change the reminder time but also type some text in the description field. Somehow this tricks Google into modifying the reminder and description for all events in the series when it syncs to the phone or Outlook. Another option with the phone is to delete all the calendar data on it, and re-sync from Google Calendar. This is useful if the phone calendar becomes totally out of sync with the Google Calendar and events on the phone can't be changed to make it right. Of course, this only works if you keep your master calendar on Google Calendar, because you will lose all the calendar data on the phone.
1) Goto settings/accounts & sync and turn off auto-sync
2) Goto settings/applications/manage applications/all and find "calendar" and "calendar storage". Choose each of those and hit "clear data" for both. The calendars should be completely blank.
3) Reboot the phone
4) Turn auto-sync back on. The phone should populate with the data from the Google Calendar.
