syncing iOS bookmarks via iTunes doesn't work

Some background on my bookmarks. I always used a utility (Xmarks) to sync my bookmarks with their cloud service. With iCloud and Safari 5.0 this had some major problems and still does. So basically I copied over my bookmarks to Safari and continued using it. For a long time Safari and my iPhone had similar but not quite in-sync bookarks. A week or so ago, Safari 6 (which has been horribly buggy for me) deleted all my bookmarks after one restart. The bookmarks were on my iPhone. I didn't mind much because iTunes hadn't been syncing my bookmarks anyway.

I tried to fix that today to get my bookmarks back on my Mac. Turning off and on the bookmarks syncing for my iPhone in iTunes seemed to have no effect. Eventually after a restart of iTunes, I turned on bookmark syncing and it decided to sync my bookmarks. Unfortunately it deleted all my bookmarks on my iPhone. I did a restore and I'm back to where I was.

Any way to fix the bookmark syning via usb cable from Phone to Safari?

I'm running iTunes 10.7 on up-to-date snow leopard.