how to delete duplicate contacts in Windows live mail

This is a bad solution, since the program recognize different contacts as duplicats, meaning it wants du merge contacts that are different people, causing havoc im my address book.

For my part, this only doubles the duplicated contacts, so now I have 17704 contacts in my address book.

ARRGH!

That won't work if there are no duplicate contacts in People. You won't get any error message because there is no error to report. 

I have In my Windows Live Mail I have some 50 contacts, and half of them are duplicates. Of each pair of duplicate contacts, one contact is labeled "Address book" and the other is not. The one marked "Address book" can be edited or deleted. The other contact cannot be edited or deleted.

Neither of your suggestions work at all and there are no error messages to report.

This has obviously been going on for years and MS can't sort it out.

This is how it works on Windows 7-

So here goes..

Make sure you have all your contacts on your outlook.com people list, and all duplicates have been removed.

Download a copy of you contacts as a backup.

Close Windows Live.

On your PC navigate using Windows explorer to 

C:\users\username\appdata\local\microsort\windowslive\contacts.    (where username is your login name)

In the contacts folder you will find a folder named the same as your email address - delete the entire folder.

Open Windows Live, sign in and your contacts should be the same as your Outlook.com list.

That won't work if there are no duplicate contacts in People. You won't get any error message because there is no error to report. 

I have In my Windows Live Mail I have some 50 contacts, and half of them are duplicates. Of each pair of duplicate contacts, one contact is labeled "Address book" and the other is not. The one marked "Address book" can be edited or deleted. The other contact cannot be edited or deleted.

Neither of your suggestions work at all and there are no error messages to report.

The unedited version of my reply was included in the notification e-mail (although it's OK on the site).  Please note that everything following 'I hope this helps or, at least, gives you food for thought' should be disregarded, and was deleted from the actual posting.

It's not clear that your problem was the same as mine.  Mine was that I have contacts in WL Mail that sync with Outlook.com (aka people.live.com) and, when I clicked on 'clean up contacts', it merged the duplicates at outlook.com, but they still appeared as duplicates in wl mail.

In the end, I decided it wasn't worth wasting any more time, and I got rid of the duplicates manually, doing a few at a time.

If you have too many to contemplate doing it manually, and your contacts are not duplicated in one of WL Mail or Outlook.com, I would try the following (bear in mind that I haven't tried it, but it seems to me that it should work and, as you'll have a backup, you will be safe):

-back up (export) the GOOD contact list (the one that doesn't have duplicates)

-delete all of the contacts in the BAD list (the one that has duplicates)

-close down both wl mail and outlook.com

-open wl mail and outlook.com

If the above doesn't work, I'd try:

-backup (export) the GOOD contact list (you'll already have this if you tried the above).

-delete all of the contacts that are in the BAD contact list

-delete all of the contacts that are in the GOOD list

-close down both wl mail and outlook.com.

-open up either wl mail or outlook.com (i.e. the one from which you exported the GOOD contacts)

-import the GOOD contacts from back up.

-open up the other application, and the contacts should have synched.

I hope this helps or, at least, gives you food for thought.