What the hell – it was messing up because the Outlook profile wasn’t set up when I first configured it to synchronize, as far as I can tell…

Removed any Outlook profile I had, deleted the association in ActiveSync, adjusted all contacts in Outlook, and then re-synced the Q.  Voila.  Duplicates of all existing contacts…

Oh, wait.

I realize now I could have set it to overwrite existing contacts, but instead I did a reset of the phone anyway.  Back to square 1, synced contacts, reset all sound and display preferences, and we’re good.

Now I need a freeware WAP browser… and something for SSH, perhaps.