People links randomly generated for the wrong people

Okay, here's how I think I fixed it.  First of all, manually relinking from Outlook.com didn't really help because that didn't have the link associations for my external Exchange account.  Doing the relinking from my phone didn't help because as long as the other phone and computers were on, those were re-syncing the corruption back to the server.  So I uninstalled the People/Mail/Calendar/Messaging apps from all Windows 8 PCs that were connected to my Microsoft ID, shut down the ones not necessary, and shut down the second Windows Phone leaving only my Nokia Lumia 810 to be connected to the Microsoft cloud service under my MS ID.

THEN I went through each contact on the phone and manually fixed the links by unlinking all of the people who were incorrectly linked (sometimes up to 50 per contact) and then manually linking the ones who actually were the same person.  That took a while, but it seemed to stick.  I know the phone isn't what made the linked contact database corrupt since it's so locked down, nobody can access the linking information.

Then once my contacts were all good on the phone, I booted up my Windows 8 tablet and installed the People/Mail/Calendar/Messaging app from the Windows Store.  After opening those apps, they downloaded all of the new information from my previously saved accounts and correctly linked the contacts.

Then I reinstalled the People/Mail/Calendar/Messaging app on my Windows 8 Media Center (which is the one that I had done a system restore on the other night).  It did NOT download the correct contact linking information and started giving me the wrong random links again!  So I quickly uninstalled those apps to stop the syncing.  Then I looked on my Lumia 810 again and fixed the small number of contact links that the Windows 8 MCE had broken.

Back on the Windows 8 MCE, I ran disk cleanup in order to remove all temporary files and rebooted for good measure.  After that I tried reinstalling the People/Mail/Calendar/Messaging app again, and that finally downloaded the proper linking information for my contacts!  Phew!

I'm having exactly the same issue. I thought it was the Phone, but it may be caused by the People app. I'm using Windows 8, Windows RT and a Lumia 920 and have on all corrupt contacts (ie random linked). I see the same in outlook.com.

I will try to remove the People app from all machines, relink it all in the Phone and then sync again.

Fixing it in multiple places multiple times seems to have gotten most of mine back in order.  It's a real pain.  Do you happen to have an Exchange 2003 SP2 account on your phone and Windows 8/RT machines as well?  That Exchange account plus Outlook.com, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn are the main contacts that I sync.  Turning off Google contact sync seems to have helped, but it may be my old Exchange account that whatever is linking contacts is confused by.

It's also possible that you may have some contacts with null "DisplayName" values.  Another developer found that this was the case with my Outlook.com/Microsoft account and that was causing problems with his Windows Phone 8 Google Voice speech UI app (since all contacts are supposed to have a "DisplayName" (Also known as "File As") field.  Deleting those contacts (or fixing their fields) seems to have helped with the random linking a bit as well. 

Adam, I couldn't agree more: it's a real pain.

I'm using Office 365 which is Exchange 2010 I believe..

I had some exotic links...

Linked to my Microsoft account:

- Facebook

- Twitter

- LinkedIn

- Yahoo

Linked to my Skype:

- Microsoft

- Facebook

On the Phone I had the Microsoft account, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Skype.

Last night I disconnect all of these (except Microsoft and my Office 365), removed all accounts from the Phone and rebooted the Phone. Then added Facebook and Twitter again. And reinstalled the Skype.

This morning I received a Phone call from person X with the photo of person Y. Argggg.

I did not have these problems on the Lumia 900 so first I was blaming WP8. Then I thought it was Skype and now I think it might be the Windows 8 People app. So I removed it on all machines and will manually fix all my > 300 contacts.

I will check the DisplayName you mentioned.

Actually, now that I logon to Outlook.com / People, I see something interesting. All the contacts that have link issues became favourites. Although I never marked them as Favourite. Will unlink them and remove them from favourites, see how that goes.

I've run into this too and was also blaming it on Windows Phone 8, but I too am starting to think it's related to the People app in Windows 8 instead.  I previously went through on my phone and manually checked each contact to fix the links... unlinking contacts that were mis-linked, and linking ones that should have been.

Today I noticed contacts marked as Favorites that I know I did not mark, and lots of newly mis-linked contacts.

I noticed something of a pattern in that some contacts that were incorrectly linked were incorrectly linked in both directions.  That is, the main display for "Person A" may have had 2 records that were actually "A" (let's say my Office 365 account and Facebook) and an incorrect item from "Person B" (let's say Twitter).  Looking at "Person B", they had 2 correct links (Office 365 & Facebook), and the Twitter account for "A".  Hope that makes sense.

One other thing I'll throw in the mix... I have an Office 365 account (P1 plan) that is the same email address as my Microsoft account (aka "Windows Live", "Microsoft Passport", etc.).  That has caused some sign-in weirdness over the year or so that I've had it.  Even though I have no contacts in my "Microsoft account" (what would be Hotmail or outlook.com), aside from the Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. ones that have synced there, I wonder if there is something getting corrupt/confused going between my account that exists in Office 365 and the Hotmail/outlook.com version.

It's all a mess and I can't even guess where I would begin if I tried to contact support.  I think I'll try to hunt down all the various devices that may be syncing my contacts, remove the Windows 8 people/mail apps from all of them, check the DisplayName attributes, do what I can to clean things up on my phone, then see about starting to reinstall the apps.