I've just noticed on my phone that one of my contacts had disappeared. On close inspection, it hasn't disappeared as such, rather it has been merged into another contact (which was under a different name which has now disappeared).

So to be clear, if I had a Mr X and a Miss Y contact, I now only have a Mr X contact and all Miss Y's info is contained in Mr X's contact along with the original data (including the photo).

Checking my gmail contacts on the PC shows that everything is OK there i.e. Mr X and Miss Y still exist and are separate.

A bit of a pain, but no hassle as I can just resync to my gmail contacts - I thought at least. I cannot get the phone to sync to gmail contacts. I've gone to Accounts&Sync and checked that contacts is set to sync and that seemed to run, but not solve the problem - the two contacts are still merged on the phone but not on gmail. I've forced a manual sync from the phone and ditto. I've rebooted the phone and the same again. I even tried to delete and reset the account, but I can't do that without a factory reset which is my last option as presumably I'll lose all installed apps and so on and have to reinstall/set up pages again etc etc

So does anyone know how I can force a resync with my gmail contacts, or any alternative ways of solving the above problem?