Address book issues: duplicates and syncing to phone

Question

I know this is a common problem, and why Apple cannot offer a better solution, or system, is frustrating.
The problem is basically multiple entries in my address book.
I know the issue has to do with icloud, but I cannot figure out how to eliminate the multiple entries without going one by one and deleting.
And I hestiate to do this because I am afraid they will come back.
Frankly, I am very frustrated with icloud.
As far as I am concerned it has caused more problems than it is worth.
I am ready to disable it totally.
Problem is, if I do that now, then all of my contacts in my address boook disappear.
Part of the problem,. I know, is that I still have a mobilme account, and somehow I have two icloud accounts.
Question: is there any way to merge my two icloud accounts, so I opnly have one.
Or can I just delete one? If so, how?
Another problem, I cannot get my addresses on my mac to appear in my iphone(4).
I have tried selecting the sync option to replace all addresses on my iphone, one time, with the addresses on the computer, but it doesn't work.
Certain addresses on my computer do not appear on my phone.
The other day, I went to my phone to call a contact andf found I had about 6 entries for every contact.
I had to go in and disable a bunch of accounts, and finally got back to onbe set, but now some contacts are missing.
Why a simple solution to eliminate showing duplicate entries cannot be found is frustrating.
Seems simple to me: if the info is duplicated, don't show it.
Seems like this simpkle rule could also apply to alerts: everytime I get an alert on my phone, it shows up 5 or 6 times in a row.
But that's another post.......

Answer 1

Great.
I think the TM restore would have been much quicker. I was under the assumption that everything was good on the Mac address book.
Not sure what happened since then.  Did you read my post (at 2:01pm above) before things went wrong?
"Try this. Disable iCloud on your mac. Select to keep contacts on the computer when quiting. Verify address book contains all your contacts. If you don't have a backup such as TM, export address book contacts so you will have a backup.
Your address book should have been correct or you could have corrected the contacts then and you would have had the backup files exported if you didn't have or trust TM.
Go to the iCloud website and delete all contacts there.
At the iCloud website, you should have been able to select all addresses at one time and delete. That would have left no addresses in iCloud. Only addresses left should have been on your Mac from the last step.
Once done, go back and log into iCloud on your computer and merge the contacts. The website should now contain the addresses from your address book.
Unless something else was wrong and creating multiple contacts, the only addresses in iCloud would have been merged from what was in your address book on your computer.
I don't know what happened or where we went wrong. I'll check back in the morning if you post any other info.
Hope it works out.