MobileMe Sync: Triplicate or more Contacts

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Mar 28, 2006
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Okay, this is driving me crazy and I'm hoping somebody has some ideas.

I have 2 iMacs, and my wife has an iPhone (3g, current s/w). Running Snow Leopard on the iMacs. Separate user accounts for every family member. Each family member has an account on MobileMe. All sync'g turned on.

Okay, so my wife's Address Book (AB) starts showing 3 or 4 copies of every contact (I don't know when this started but she just told me about it 2 weeks ago). So I think its a MobileMe database issue, so I go to the "primary" iMac and use its AB as the baseline, clean up the duplicates, and tell it to overwrite the MobileMe data. I go to the 2nd iMac and tell it to overwrite the computer data with MobileMe. I do nothing on her iPhone, assuming once the MobileMe database is cleaned up it will sync to the iPhone.

Initially, each computer and iPhone shows the correct AB. Later (maybe one day) the same thing happens again -- multiple duplicate contacts everywhere. I don't sync the iPhone contacts or calendar with iTunes (and confirmed this).

So I go through the process again, but this time I turn off sync'g on the iPhone and tell it to delete the contacts from the phone. Every device has the correct AB for a while. Then the duplicates show up again.

So now I go the nuclear option. I clean up the AB on the primary iMac, and back it up. I then delete all contacts on all computers and the iPhone. I delete the MobileMe account from the iPhone. I go to the MobileMe web site and manually delete all the contacts from my wife's account. So now, there are no contacts anywhere. I then reimport the "clean" contacts onto primary iMac. I tell it to sync to MobileMe, overwriting anything on MobileMe. I then turn on sync'g on the 2nd iMac and tell it to have MobileMe overwrite the computer. Lastly, I then reinstall the MobileMe account on the iPhone.

All is well for a bit (maybe a day), and the duplicates emerge yet again!

I'm now at a loss. My contacts (under my user account) don't do this, but I rarely add contacts to my personal AB on the Mac (most of mine are on my work MS Exchange server).

Anybody have an idea on what's happening? I've searched the net and read a number of threads on this problem, but the "nuclear option" should have fixed this.
 

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