How do I keep long-deleted contacts from coming back to life

Outlook 2003 on Windows XP. I actually have about 850 contacts
in Outlook, but synchronization software (both BlackBerry and 3rd
party) see 3000+ contacts...because they are seeing the old versions
of contact records that have been modified or deleted.

In other words, apparently whenever a contact is edited, Outlook
writes the revised version to the end of the file and marks the
original record 'inactive'. I assume that these 'inactive' records
are supposed to get deleted at some point, but clearly that hasn't
happened in my case. And synchronization software shouldn't 'see'
the 'inactive' records, but it does.

I'm pretty sure this is what's happening since the synchronization
software brings to life contacts that were deleted from Outlook
years ago.

I've already run SCANPST.EXE but it didn't help.

Any suggestions of how to get rid of the old phantom records which
can't be seen in Outlook but are seen by synchronization software?

Robert Brown
C: 408-398-0575
robertebrown@earthlink.net