Doubling Gmail Contact Groups?

Now that I've been using Gmail for a while, I generally love it; but I've encountered a persistent, annoying issue with contact groups and wonder whether someone has tamed it.

Basically, my contacts' displayed groups frequently double:

If I select affected contacts and "remove" their duplicate groups, they return to displaying their groups normally - for a while. Within a day or two, they – though I'm not positive the exact same contacts are involved – return to doubly displaying their groups. Frankly, this doubling affects more of my contacts than not.

Any ideas, Gmailers?

Flashbacks to Hotmail

I'm pretty new to Gmail, and already I'm having flashbacks to Hotmail. For the last hour I've been greeted by:

We're sorry, but Gmail is temporarily unavailable. We're currently working to fix the problem -- please try logging in to your account in a few minutes.

So much for a few minutes. Isn't SaaS great? At least in the good old days I could call my ISP or hit my Exchange server. ;-)