I've done a bit of searching around and can't really find the answer I'm looking for.

I recently got a Desire and copied over my contacts via my SIM card onto it. Now when I go to view my contacts I have at least two copies of everyone. The main two are ones from MyPhonebook and from the SIM. What it doesnt llt me do is filter out the contacts from the SIM

On top of that I've got Gmail contacts auto-sync'd as well as Facebook contacts.. tbh it's all a total mess!

I've read that people are just deleting their SIM contacts (using another phone) to stop them appearing (the option to not show SIM contacts is greyed out for me? ).

Is the best thing to do, to just trawl through my Gmail contacts and set them exactly as I want them, then link those to my FB contacts in the Desire? If I do this, I presume I won't ever 'lose' any of my contacts should I not have 3G/wifi available? It is cached on the phone, right?

I would just suggest logging onto your gmail contacts on the pc, delete all the duplicates if there are any, then delete all the contacts on your phone and set it to show the gmail ones only. Then let the phone sync the gmail contacts over.

As above control it from Google on your PC. Be very careful if you link phone contacts to Google contacts, as its easy to delete them from both by mistake. I have everyone in Google, have it to show only contacts with a phone number and have hidden Facebook people by default too.

It can take a little setup, but its worth it.

Right I am in the process of doing this. Tedious!

But if I leave my SIM contacts on my SIM card, my phone will upload them again to my Gmail, correct? So I should delete them all off my SIM card?