This seems to happen sporadically.  I restarted Evolution, and now
it's not happening.

It appears to be a problem of the contact editor dialog sometimes not
launching.  It will occasionally also happen when I double-click on a
minicard; the contact editor dialog doesn't appear.

I cannot yet figure out why the dialog sometimes appears and sometimes
does not.

When the problem occurs, though, it occurs throughout the entire
Evolution session.  If I restart Evolution, the contact editor dialog
will appear when it needs to.  Perhaps some addressbook component
isn't getting started all the time?

"Worksforme"
This may be Evolution Data server as well.
Any chance you can get a bt? As is, this report is not very informative...

I'm pretty certain this was discused today in the meeting and this is
a duplicate.

Created attachment 44369 [details]
strace when clicking on the new contact button

I have the same Probem with Evolution 2.0.2, but it does not matter if
I restart Evolution or not, it never works. Nothing gets printed out
to the console, but I attached the important part of a strace (from
start of clicking the button 'till nothing happens after that).

An strace is not generally useful for debugging purposes. Do other
"New" events work? Is this a source installation? Can you view contacts?

Yes, I can write a new mail through the new-button. But I do not see
any contacts in contact view. I don't even see one vertical line and
the message "no item found, doubleclick to add new" (or similar) which
should be there IMO. Just plain white.
It is a source install, as I use Gentoo. ./configure was 
./configure --prefix=/usr --host=i686-pc-linux-gnu
--mandir=/usr/share/man --infodir=/usr/share/info --datadir=/usr/share
--sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var/lib --disable-default-binary
--enable-nss --enable-smime --disable-ipv6 --disable-nntp
--disable-pilot-conduits --with-openldap=no --without-krb5
--with-kde-applnk-path=no --enable-nss=yes
--with-nspr-includes=/usr/lib/mozilla/include/nspr
--with-nspr-libs=/usr/lib/mozilla
--with-nss-includes=/usr/lib/mozilla/include/nss
--with-nss-libs=/usr/lib/mozilla --disable-default-binary --enable-nss
--enable-smime --disable-ipv6 --disable-nntp --disable-pilot-conduits
--enable-gtk-doc

If you need more info, let me know.

Works fine for me with development snapshot.

evolution-2.2.1.0.200504010400-0.snap.novell.0.1

Changing target milestone as 2.3

retargetting bugs with severity=major from 2.3 to 2.5

Works fine for me.
Need some more information to solve the issue.
Whether it happens with the latest version of evolution also.
Some sort of stack trace might also help.
Console messages from both Evolution and evolution-data-server.

Closing this as obsolete, please reopen if found to be happening again.