Contacts show up as "1" in address book

So this is such a messed up problem that the Apple Store, Zimbra Mail, & Microsoft Exchange support teams couldn't answer, nor find any other cases of it happening. I'll explain it as clearly as I can and then get into soft/hardware specs.

I have two mail accounts on my iPhone and iPad 2: my Gmail account and my Outlook Exchange account. The problem does not exist for anyone else in my company, and a lot of people have the exact same setup I do as well. If I am sending an email to an email address that I have not ever emailed before, manually type it in, and send, that email address is automatically added to my iPhone & iPad contact lists as the number "1". These mysterious contacts continue to grow, leaving me with "1's" throughout my contact list. The same thing happens if someone new emails me. If that person has not emailed me before and I reply to their email, the contact too is added as a "1". Lastly, the issue also happens if I send an email from my iPhone or iPad to a "new" contact; they too are added to the list of "1's".

These "new" contacts do not show up as "1's" within Outlook, Outlook Web, Zimbra, or Zimbra Desktop; they show up only as email addresses. Also, these "new" contacts are not being added to my gmail contact list either.

To better illustrate this, here are screen shots of this in action.

Image 1: This is an email I received from tech support over at Voxel. The tech copied another "new" email address to the chain he had established with me. (Note: His contact had already been changed to a "1")

Image 2: This is a shot of the contact details when I tapped on the "1" in that email.

Image 3: I replied all to his email with the new address being added to the conversation. As soon as I hit send, that new address that was now part of the email chain was auto-added to my contact list as a "1".

Image 4: This is the contact details as they can be seen AFTER replying to him via email. Prior to me replying, his contact information only showed up as an email address. (see Image 1)

So there you have it. Great mystery that is quite annoying to say the least.

Here are all the details that I can think of giving you.

Devices:

- iPhone 4 running iOS5.0 (9A334) [please note that the issue had been going on since May, back when I was running 4.3]

- iPad 2 running iOS5.0 (9A334)

- HP Envy running Windows 7 64-bit (primary machine used to sync)

- Dell Latitude E6510 Windows 7 32-bit (work computer running Outlook & Zimbra)

Other

- Running Outlook 2010

- Gmail & exchance email addresses are both on iPad & iPhone