Windows 7: Synching contacts on Windows Phone 7.5

I have a problem synching my new Lumia 800 phone running WP7.5 with my primary Windows Live account which has the form xyz@outlook.com

I can send and receive emails.

However, my contacts do not update although they must have synched initially because they were imported from my phone at the time I set up its primary Live Id. That is, neither new contacts on the phone nor in my contacts entered via my PC have synched. Thus I have two increasingly divergent sets of contacts, one on the phone and one stored in outlook.com.

Initially the error code on the phone was 86000108, but it is now 80070490 'Attention required'.

By the way, I also have a Googlemail account on the phone and this is synching without any problems.

I do wonder, however, why for the primary Live Id on the phone I am only offered 'Email' under 'Content to synchronize' whereas on other phone accounts I am also offered 'Contacts' among other things. Do I have no choice but to synch contacts, or is it that contacts are not supposed to update for the primary Live Id? I hope it is not the latter!