Glenn Morris <rgm+news@stanford.edu> writes:

> Eric Böse-Wolf wrote:
>
>> as written in the subject, I have (appt-activate 1) in my .emacs,
>> but appt.el does not display its reminder windows for appointsments
>> in my diaryfile for the present day.
>>
>> I have to do M-x appt-activate twice to get it working.
>
> Works for me:
>
> cat ~/diary:
> 08/21 15:00 do stuff
>
> emacs-22.1 -q --no-site-file --eval '(appt-activate 1)'
> and there is my appointment reminder.

I did set european-calendar-style to t by the customization facility, 
and (appt-activate 1) had been before my customization part in .emacs

deleting european-calendar-style from custom-set-variables and writing
(setq european-calendar-style t)
(appt-activate 1)
in .emacs works now for me.