Exchange 2010 SP1 Server running on Win2K8 R2. 30 users, server processes mail for 2 external domains. I have a single user on this exchange box experiencing an odd duplication issue with their contacts. I can't make sense of it, and would like any troubleshooting suggestions that anyone might have. The specifics: The User has 572 legitimate contacts. Various Categories are assigned to most of these contacts. The user accesses their mailbox from three different PCs, 1 running Outlook 2003, One with Outlook 2007, and the third with Outlook 2010. The Outlook 2010 client is the primary client used. The affected user has 2 delegates with ownership permissions on their contact folder, set through the Outlook client. This users' contacts are typically set to be filed by Last name, First name. Here's whats happening: Certain contacts are being modified to include that contact's email address in the "Full Name" field just after the name of the contact. (i.e. the "Full Name" field shows: "Joe Smith joe@example.com") Other contacs are being created with the email address as the only information in the "Full Name" field. (i.e. the "Full Name" field shows only: "joe@example.com"), in the cases where the email address is the only info in the Full Name field, the rest of the fields in the duplicate contact match the info of the original, which has the Full Name field correctly displayed with the contact's name only (i.e. "Joe Smith"). I can sort the enitre list, and if I delete any contacts that show an email address as the Full Name, the Total Item count for the contact folder does not change. The duplicate items that I delete go to my Deleted Items folder (I have ownership permissions on the affected user's entire mailbox). When I look at the 'Date Created' field of these deleted contacts, they indicate that groups of contacts are affected at the same time. For Example: In this case, I deleted 179 contact items. When looking at my deleted Items folder, those 179 contacts were seprated by creation time into 5 groups. Those 5 groups have a lot of repeat items, but technically each group contains a different subset of contacts. For example, one group created on 10/16/10 had only 6 contacts in it. A group of dupes created on 9/19/10 had 63. All 6 of the 10/16 contacts were also in the 9/19 group. The affected contacts have another symptom: They have an incorrect Country/Region set. Specifically, they have a "U" set instead of "United States." Not every single one of them have the incorrect Country/Region set though, but 97%. I have looked at the message tracking logs to see if the affected user is sending email at the times of duplicate creation. They are not. The user has Blackberry set up against this mailbox. (Running BES 5.2). In looking at the Security Event Viewer logs to determine whether logons were occurring at the times of duplication, I realized that I didn't have the log set to be of any use for troubleshooting. (it was set to overwrite events as needed. This has been corrected). Finally, this issues was first identified 3 months ago. When originally ID'd, all contacts were manually corrected. That is: All contacts that only had an email address in the Full Name field were delted, and all contacts that had the email address following the actual contact's name in the Full Name field had those email addresses manually removed. Also, there was no incorrect Country/Region information on affected contacts when manual correction occurred the first time. I'm feeling like this has to be some sort of syncing issue. The Antivirus client on all 3 machines used to connect to Exchange is Microsoft Security Essentials. It used to be ESET. This problem happened before and after the A/V transition. I don't know where to go from here to determine the root cause of this issue. Manually correcting the duplicates doesn't correct whatever's triggering the issue. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thanks!!

After further inspection, 100% of the affected contacts have the word "Family" in the Full Name field. Can't be a coincidence. I have manually removed the auto added email addresses from the Full Name Field, and also removed the "United States of America" from the address text field. The country/region is set separately in its own field, so its existence in the Address text was redundant.

This is classic PDA at fault. I have seen odd things happen before when a PDA is synchronising with the mailbox. Contact modification is a common issue, particularly the duplication. The creation time is the usual way to remove the duplicated contacts. If you can, I would look at remove the user from BES, resetting the contacts list and see whether the problem continues. It might be that removing the user from BES, wiping the device and then setting it up again will cause it to settle down. Simon.Simon Butler, Exchange MVP Blog | Exchange Resources

Thanks for the reply- I have scheduled a wipe and reload of the affected user's BES account and device for 11/5/10, and will post back if the issue is resolved after that. Jeremy