HTC Droid Eris :: No Longer Gets Hot Or Eats Battery But Can't Sync Google Contacts

So, like many of you, my phone would occasionally get hot, and the battery would just zoom down to nothing. Usually this was just intermittent, and a restart would cure it.On June 10, it was happening, and persisted despite restarts, battery pulls, etc. I finally found that the problem was google trying to sync contacts. It was having some problem and cycling forever. When I unchecked the google contacts sync in the accounts preference panel, problem stopped. My battery life has never been better. Routinely getting 18-20 hrs or more.BUT I want to sync my google contacts! Every time I trial re-checking that box, it cycles and cycles, every few seconds giving a little error at the bottome of the screen (in prefs) "Sync is currently experiencing problems. It will be back shortly".I have 700-something contacts (Only 250 real "My Contacts" but another 500 or so auto-created contacts from gmail use.Presumably one of those entries has some corruption, but I can't figure out which, and I don't want to potentially lose all the contacts.I have seen that for some people this was fixed by factory reset and resync, but then the problem came back a few weeks later.