Anyone have a Droid phone?

Alright well I got an HTC Evo Shift a week or two ago and I'm LOVING it so far.. Except one thing that pisses me off, ALOT.

At first, I was like "Oh great, I can sync my google account and not have to sign into Gmail to access my mail. However, I didn't know it'd sync EVERYTHING. Including my Google contacts. Usually, that's not a problem, but Gmail is pretty retarded when it comes to contacts. If I email someone ONCE, they get saved as a "contact". So now when I go to text/email someone, I type in a letter to find their name, and I end up getting like 18 different results before I get the one I want.

This is REALLY annoying.. I need to set up my Google account on my phone to access the Android Market, but that's all I want. I don't want it to save the 800 people I've emailed to my phone. How can I keep it from doing that? I turned off Auto Sync and it still ended up syncing it.. Better yet, how do I unsync my google account? I googled it (ironically), and apparently the only way to do it is to reset my phone to factory settings. Is there another way? This is the second time I'm resetting my phone, it's starting to get annoying.

If I really have no choice but to reset, is there a free program that will let me backup the apps/contacts/other info on my phone before I reset?

 

Yeah sorry to break it to you but I also had to reset my phone >.<

 

How do I keep this from happening in the future? I was okay, until I tried to send a picture to my friend's email, and accidentially pressed to send it with Gmail.. Then it started syncing everything, even though I told it not to.

This is pissing me off so much, it's not even funny. Something this simple should be easy to fix, but I've looked everywhere, and nothing..