I finally gave in and deleted the Contacts data and cache. I also went into recovery mode and wiped the cache partition and then repaired apps. It fixed my issue, BUT my recent call log was empty. I had to restore that from my backups. If you go this route, make sure to do a complete backup so you can restore missing data.
Yes, After spending many unuseful hours with samsung tech on the phone and seeing the suggestions that didn't help what finally did fix it was i cleared my contact cache AND data (after backing it up to the cloud) but I DID NOT restore it, this was the key, the contacts must be corrupted somehow with this update, I had to reenter by hand all my contacts because everytime I tried to restore it through the backup I would get the Android.process.acore keeps stopping error and the phone, contacts and any messaging app would not work. The Wipe cache and repair apps don't work if you try to restore the contact backup. They are stupid at Samsung for not fixing this or figuring it out.
