Back from breakfast and finishing up my notes, which I now will start typing, much as I'd rather not. But, the good news is I got a really smart Apple guy - he called me, as promised, and we discussed the problems and the weird error message - he said it absolutely wasn't the computer, since it happened on both iMac and laptop - he suspected it was the cord - since I had another cord in a drawer I swapped it out and voila - we plugged it into the iMac and it worked and opened iTunes. He'd already had me go into the iTunes preferences and select the option for the phone not to sync automatically. Then he had me go into info on the phone menu and select manually sync contacts, which I did. We got that same window pop-up that said syncing will change 5% of your contacts, only this time it said "add" instead of "remove" - we clicked sync and a moment later my address book on the computer was back to normal. So, that's all good now.
About the occasional phone freeze, he had a suggestion for the next time it happens, which is to go into the phone settings, choose general, then reset, and then to click only reset the network settings, which is very quick and which, he suspects, will solve that particular problem. He also admitted freely that this last update has some bugs that are being worked on. I also purchased Apple Care for the phone, which I apparently hadn't when I bought it, so I'm good for another year.
