10.5.6: Address Book not saving edits, spitting out gobbledygook in text fields

[Tranquillado]

For the first time in a long while I opened AB to edit an entry and here's what happened:

I added an new e-mail field and pasted an addy from a text doc and clicked Edit to save -- it did not save; the field remained blank. Then, when attempting to manually enter the addy the output did not match. For example: if I want to enter john@123.com this is how the output appears in AB:

jjojohjohnjohn@john@1john@12john@123john@123.john@123.cjohn@123.cojohn@123.com

Pressing the Delete button just adds to the string, as does pressing an arrow button.

I grabbed this from the Console:

4.10.09 10:16:30 A AddressBookManager88431 Records in database: 146
4.10.09 10:16:30 A AddressBookManager88431 Records in metadata: 150
4.10.09 10:16:30 A AddressBookManager88431 Metadata without a record: {(
"1E34D24E-0D37-43F3-9821-DBA60CE1B150:ABPerson",
"9F8A52D4-6077-4C11-AD56-FD42D4A3AA42:ABPerson",
"1992AD2B-8032-4CE0-8B1C-99B62D3120CA:ABPerson",
"FAEBC182-17D1-4837-A614-9C54F4C640FE:ABPerson"
)}
4.10.09 10:16:30 A AddressBookManager88431 Metadata without a record: {(
"1E34D24E-0D37-43F3-9821-DBA60CE1B150:ABPerson",
"9F8A52D4-6077-4C11-AD56-FD42D4A3AA42:ABPerson",
"1992AD2B-8032-4CE0-8B1C-99B62D3120CA:ABPerson",
"FAEBC182-17D1-4837-A614-9C54F4C640FE:ABPerson"
)}
4.10.09 10:16:34 A Address Book88428 Conversion to encoding 30 failed for string "
John Doe
Compa..."

This one has me buffaloed.

Thanks!