I'm trying to help my wife with a problem she's having with her address
book. She uses gmail and has a macbook, ipad and iphone. When iCloud
came out she went and got "geniuses" to set up her devices to sync her
contacts, with iCloud now being the source of all contacts. She now has
two problems: addressbook performance is terrible on her laptop - it
uses up to 100% of the CPU, and also autocomplete is providing
nonsensical suggestoins. I note also that for some of the imported
entries a single contact can have many (like 100) "work" email addresses
associated with it. It seems clear that something is wrong, maybe with
the initial import.
At this point, she's lost faith with the genius bar. I am experienced
with computers, but really only know linux and windows well, so I am
worried that I might delete all her contacts. I nosed around in
~/Library/Application Support/Address Book and found a lot of
interesting files, mostly dated from when she went to the genius bar.
There's also a Sources subdirectory that itself has a subdirectory which
contains a big file that is more current. I noted that the file
timestamp changed when I ran Address Book.
I toyed with the idea of moving the folder under Sources somewhere, and
seeing what happens when I run Address Book, but I am a bit scared to do
that. I don't see why the main address book file wouldn't be in the
top level folder, and I wonder if the existence of a file in Sources
overrides that.
Also wondering if it is pulling down the file from
iCloud each time? Maybe some config setting is wrong?
Any advice would be very much appreciated. I am quite happy to type things into a terminal windows, edit files, etc
Thanks!!!

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