How do OCS Address books work, and why is mine broken?

That is a very good question...

A great link i eventually was able to get is at

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb963980.aspx

 So...

AD has all the info

The user replicator shifts this info to the OCS SQL DB in the ABUserEntry table

The ABServer process moves these files to a NTFS files structure in the form of Full and Differential files with names that are hex of a date that once happened :S

These are then made available through IIS where the client will download these to galcontacts.db

Saying that info is still pulled from OL contacts and also in some instances direct LDAP requests are made to the OCS pool itself