I got some weird issues today referring to wrong display names of some users on a site collection in SharePoint 2010.

What happend?

Some users’ display names have been updated in Active Directory. The User Profile Synchronization runs every night on the SharePoint Farm.

All went well. But on a single sitecollection the display name (Preferred name) remains still with the old data. Even in the people picker the old values were shown.

Just on that specific sitecollection.

I tried a full synchronisation, I started all the User Profil Synchronization Jobs I found in Central Administration. Nothing changed.

Then I found the right KB-Article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2012619

It says: only users with at least contributor rights will have their profile data updated on a site due to performance reasons.

This is by design. The only solution ist to give your users at least these contributor rights. If you delete and add the users again their data will also be updated but only this time and not automatically in the future.

“Contribute or live with your old profile data on this website”