Planet CakePHP

I'm using a self referencing HABTM model with Participants. You sign up for an event and when you log in to your reservation/profile you see a list of other participants and you can choose to add yourself and others into various groups; share hotel room, share transportation from airport etc.

What I've managed so far:

1) In my profile I see the list of all other participants with checkboxes. Great so far.

2) Adding another participant works fine. Next time I edit, the participant I added is shown as checked.

3) Removing another participant works fine too as long as you still have checked participants before you submit!

Again, with words:

There are 3 participants. I'm logged in as one of them, and I see the 2 other people on the participants list. I choose to check both of them. This works fine (always). Later I choose to remove one of them (by unchecking the checkbox and hitting submit). This also works fine (always). If I want to remove the last checkbox... nothing is updated (always!). What's curious is that I can add and remove any odd combination of participants and it will always work UNLESS I choose to remove every participants in one go (removing a one and only participant is a special case of "remove all checked participants").

As far as I know, HABTMs work by first deleting all relations, then re-saving them. I can see that in my tables when I remove, add, remove, add the same participant over and over again - the id on the HABTM table is always increasing. When I deselect all participants at once, however, the relations are not updated. The ids stay the same, so it's like the save never happened.

This behaviour is so specific and peculiar, I have a feeling I'm missing something obvious here. Anyway, here's the relevant code:

Model

class Participant extends AppModel {
 var $hasAndBelongsToMany = array(
  'buddy' => array(
   'className' => 'Participant',
   'joinTable' => 'participants_participants',
   'foreignKey' => 'participant_id',
   'associationForeignKey' => 'buddy_id',
   'unique' => true,
  )
 );

Controller

function edit($id = null) {
 if (!$id && empty($this->data)) {
  $this->Session->setFlash(__('Invalid Participant', true));
  $this->redirect(array('action'=>'index'));
 }
 if (!empty($this->data)) {
  if ($this->Participant->saveAll($this->data)) {
   $this->Session->setFlash(__('The Participant has been saved', true));
   $this->redirect(array('action'=>'index'));
  } else {
   $this->Session->setFlash(__('The Participant could not be saved. Please, try again.', true));
  }
 }
 if (empty($this->data)) {
  $this->data = $this->Participant->read(null, $id);
 }

 // Fetching all participants except yourself
 $allParticipants = $this->Participant->find('list', array('conditions' => array('participant.id ' => $id)));

 // Fetching every participant that has added you to their list
 $allBuddies = $this->Participant->ParticipantsParticipant->find('list', array(
  'conditions' => array('buddy_id' => $id),
  'fields' => 'ParticipantsParticipant.participant_id',
  'order' => 'ParticipantsParticipant.participant_id ASC'
 ));

 $this->set(compact('allParticipants','allBuddies'));
}

View

    echo $form->create('Participant');
    echo $associations->habtmCheckBoxes($allParticipants, $this->data['buddy'], 'buddy', 'div', '\'border: 1px solid #000;\'', '\'border: 1px solid #000;\'');
    echo $form->end('Submit');

I'm using a slightly modified helper, habtmCheckBoxes, found here: http://cakeforge.org/snippet/detail.php?type=snippet&id=190
It works like this: function habtmCheckBoxes($rows=array(), $selectedArr=array(), $modelName, $wrapTag='p', $checkedDiv, $uncheckedDiv) {}