I've been there and feel your pain. What all types of things are you trying to sync contacts to? If you open up your contacts you can select what all to sync with. Perhaps if you uncheck some of those boxes it will help. I sync my google contacts with outlook and keep a back up copy of the outlook contacts on the computer in case things go haywire. I've found it easier to just delete all my google contacts and then sync them back after I've had troubles.
You could do something similar with a hotmail account so you have a separate place to keep them that google doesn't try to manage for you.