well, windows 7 of course, which is why i asked it on these forums, but the OS i was originally working in was vista ultimate and the program was just the simple windows calendar.
in fact, i did find a way to do this, but it has to be done from the online version of windows live by subscribing to a calendar and then using the import ics feature. it syncs to the desktop then, but the calendar will import an ics. just doesnt seem to do it from the desktop.
thanks anyway