When opening a group of contacts, the window part that usually contains
contacts initially says that there are no items to view. On my P400, it
takes half a second or so to load a group of 20 contacts, so I'll just
imagine one with 200. This could look like an error if it stays there for a
while.

This happens only when evolution first is started up until you've been
through all contact groups. After that, it seems like evo caches the lists.
Try running evolution --force-shutdown, then restart evo, to review the error.

In my opinion, it should say "Loading contact list" while loading, and then
state that there are no items when there really are no items.

Thanks again :)