- Back up both local Address Book, and the Google Contacts
- Turn off syncing with Google Contacts
- Wipe Google Contacts completely
- Turn syncing back on, and verify that it worked proper by syncing several times.
Has been working fine since then. And by "fine" I mean no nickname sync, no sorting options in Google Contacts, and all the other things OP describes are still there. But I no longer loose my data on sync.
Still goes bad. Side note: it works better with OS 10.5, because there it doesn't try to sync everything and it really does work. It works as bad as I said only on 10.6 (all minor versions tested - I kept hoping the darn Nickname sync issue would go away at some point release).
I do admit that the Spanning Sync trial I used once may have done something to my Google Contacts at one point when I checked that it shouldn't sync Suggested Contacts, but I don't see why Google would let such a thing made via the API stick forever. (And Spanning Sync wasn't for me because of the whole "give us your password" thing.)
To be fair, I sync through nuevasync and have no problems. A lot of people say "why bother" but really, they do a fine job ironing out some of the kinks. Also, Akonadi syncing on KDE seems to mostly work.
I've also tried soocial.com which I liked because it uses OAuth and I can always just revoke its access, but it sucked when it came to Prefixes and Suffixes. I have people in my address book who happen to be Jr. and Sr. or who happen to have the same name and one had no email and it mashed them up.
NuevaSync seems more focused on the mobile aspects of things and I'm really just interested in contact syncing with as few parties in between as possible. (paranoid)
