Can't sync appointments from server to phone Verizon HTC Rezound, ICS 4.0.3.

This seems to be a common problem, especially with ICS, but I have yet to find a definitive solution that works for me.

I just got my new phone, and have gone through the basic setup including syncing the phone to my workplace Exchange account. Mail's fine (up and down), contacts are fine (down at least, not sure about up), and events created on my phone are pushed up to the server and then to my office desktop, but events already on the server do not sync down to the phone.

I found one potential solution for another HTC ICS device; delete all Calendar-based data and then remove and reinstall the Exchange account. Did that, still not working. My last phone was relatively ancient (Sony XPeria X10, Android Eclair), used TouchDown for its mail program, and had a number of problems, but appointment synchronization wasn't one of them. What's the deal?
As a quick fix that got the meetings I have now onto my phone, I pulled up all forthcoming meetings and appointments that hadn't synced using Outlook, forwarded them to myself, and then pulled up the e-mails on my phone and accepted each invite. This worked and didn't create any dupes on either the phone or Outlook.

That works for now, and it seems that appointments I have created in Outlook since I set up the phone to sync are syncing correctly, if a bit delayed. We'll see about meeting invites I accept from others.

Now, this solution only works because most of my schedule is regular recurring meetings, so I only had to resend a few invites. If there is a solution that doesn't require re-accepting every invite for every meeting for the foreseeable future, I'm sure it would be helpful to those of us that have a fuller, more free-form appointment schedule.