I'm a long time Mac user but I've only just recently being trying out iCal, (Claris Organized it's NOT!! ;) ), but I cannot find a way to disable all the shaded out hours I really don't want showing or displayed, nor get rid of the vertical scroll bar except for a 2003 hint, and I don't want to go mucking about with some hacking.

I've read the Help:
" To change the time range that appears in the main calendar view, choose iCal > Preferences and click General.

To change the range of time when you’re normally available each day, choose your daytime hours from the “Day starts at” and “Day ends at” pop-up menus. All times outside that range are shaded in the daily or weekly calendar view. To set the number of hours that are displayed when you open the daily or weekly calendar view, choose a number from the Show pop-up menu. "

and searched the WWW without success.

Heck, I couldn't even get iCal to display with a boot into Lion 10.7 as the Apple site shows:
Mac 101: iCal (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2513)
and its image they show:
http://km.support.apple.com/library/APPLE/APPLECARE_ALLGEOS/HT2513/HT2513_01-mac-101-ical_id-001-en.jpg

All I want is to have iCal open and show and display only the normal times I would need, like from 8:00am to 9:00pm but so far Iv'e failed to get rid of the shaded times from showing and they are quite unnecessary for my needs.

Is there some sort of hidden click-drag area to resize what is displayed, sort of like Mail's preview pane or something??

Any suggestions welcome. Thanks.

What if you had to catch a 7:0am flight? Or a late dinner reservation? As far as I know, you can't totally prevent the unwanted hours from ever showing (i.e., 9:00pm to 8:00am). However, with the right combination of:

window size
day starts at 8:00am
day ends at 9:00pm
show 11 hours

You should be able to show only the desired hours, which will be maintained even if you resize the window.

If I had an "out of time" for any pre or post normal flight or dinner with a "normal" display, I would I would expect that I could just be able to adjust my time display to show them, for any of those seldom time type "appointments", and I sure wouldn't rely on iCal to alert me for any early morning flight with it's rather lame alert methods IMHO.

And I've tried the iCal pref settings as you suggest but it just does NOT work or display as I would expect.

So how did Apple in their KB article get iCal to show and display as their jpg shows which is what I'm looking for???
http://km.support.apple.com/library/..._id-001-en.jpg

The screenshot from the first link that you posted is basically how mine looks. Are you sure that you have the appropriate number of hours showing for each day?

btw, the second link you posted doesn't work; it's the abbreviated version of the first link.

I'm sorry about the broken image link but this should work for the image that the Apple KB article shows:
http://km.support.apple.com/library/APPLE/APPLECARE_ALLGEOS/HT2513/HT2513_01-mac-101-ical_id-001-en.jpg

And here's a shot of my iCal prefs.

And this is what I get with those settings when opening my iCal: