Is it possible to have a sorted view with repeating events?

I've been racking my brain on this for a while now... I'd really appreciate it if anyone could get me unstuck or just tell me that it can't be done!

I'd like to have a tabular view of upcoming events, where the rows of the table are sorted by date (ascending), and repeating events are only shown once.

I've tried two basic variations to achieve this result so far:

• Events Module + Repeating Events

  Using the Events module with Repeating Events, I get an ugly error when I add the "Event Repeat: Distinct Events" filter to the view. This has been discussed to some extent at http://drupal.org/node/168202.

  I'm also not especially fond of having a separate node for each recurrence of a repeating event.

• Custom Content Type + CCK Date

  This method shows a little more promise for my situation, since I can use multiple dates within a single node to express recurrences, and I can use the "Node: Distinct" filter on the view to show only one entry for recurring events.

  The only problem is that when I attempt to sort the view by the date field, the "Node: Distinct" filter seems to break and once again I have an entry for each recurrence in the table. It seems that I can either have a sorted table, or a table with distinct nodes.

  Another minor issue with this view is that I can't display the date field's "from date" as a field - I can only choose the entire date field (which also has a "to date"), so I see Feb 19, 6:15 pm - Feb 19, 8:30 pm in the table. I can independently select either the "from date"or the "to date" when adding a filter to the view... Is there some way to choose just the "from date" as a field to display in the view?

Thanks!