Address Book is creating blank contacts while idle

[RitaFM]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

Whenever I switch to address book, there are lines and lines of blank contacts which precede my first contact. While I'm looking for a contact, it will arbitrarily begin creating new blank contacts. This continues to happen after several restarts, and it is a problem with syncing to my PDA, because it wants to sync all of these blank contacts. I haven't tried anything else - wouldn't know where to begin.

 

[Diane Ross]

Whenever I switch to address book, there are lines and lines of blank contacts
which precede my first contact. While I'm looking for a contact, it will
arbitrarily begin creating new blank contacts. This continues to happen after
several restarts, and it is a problem with syncing to my PDA, because it wants
to sync all of these blank contacts. I haven't tried anything else - wouldn't
know where to begin.

Hmmmmm, this is a new one. It sounds like database corruption, but then I
have never heard of anyone seeing it actually happen. I suspect that it
might be syncing to a blank contact.

I would turn off Sync Services and clean up all your contacts in Entourage.
Erase all your contacts on your other sources, then turn Sync Services back
on and let Entourage write back to those devices.

Sync Services still causing problems for some users after SP1

<http://tinyurl.com/6ztjfl>

Always backup often when you use Sync Services! Be sure to assign a category
to every contact in your Address Book even if it's a general category.
Duplicates will be category "none" and this makes it easier to delete them.

 

[BenR16]

Operating System OS X 10.5.6 [Leopard]

I also started getting this problem this past week after I rebuilt my
database. I had not seen this before.
I thought the best thing would be to try to export my contacts into an
excel spreadsheet to try and clean them up and/or find if there is a
corrupt contact, but when I tried to export the contacts either as a
tab delimited file or entourage archive it fails even with a clean
rebuild.

 

[Diane Ross]

I thought the best thing would be to try to export my contacts into an
excel spreadsheet to try and clean them up and/or find if there is a
corrupt contact, but when I tried to export the contacts either as a
tab delimited file or entourage archive it fails even with a clean
rebuild.

Assuming you have no other backup.....It's possible if you go back to the
copy of your Identity that was created when you did the rebuild, you can
open it and extract your contacts.