I have seen this.
Start over. Delete the user and the share directory... save docs if needed. Drop their account off the mobile unit. Re-enter user (same short name) and drop their stuff back in. I never had it happen often enough to discover just WHY, and this fix takes a few minutes anyway.
i think i'm ready to give up on it again. i mean, i have the server setup and all, but when i bind client machines, either i'm not doing it right, or for some reason it's not working right.
i mean, i can't get the mobile home to sync correctly after logging in with a user account on the client machine.
if i'm on a regular account on the client machine (local to the client), then the directory service uses half the computer's resources.
and if i have it set in dns on my network stuff to look to my server, and then i leave my network, it slows down the internet.
sorry for the rant, but i've tried and tried with OS X server, and every time i seem to fail, even when it appears i have it setup right
I had the same issue when I was getting 10.5 up and running on my Xserve. I had the same error as you and had painfully long startup and login times for my client machines. I was able to trace it down to a DNS issue on my server. I also thought the DNS service was running properly, but I was wrong. After much searching(I only started working with osx server under 10.4 last year), I found a quick and easy way to check if your DNS is working. In the terminal application on your server type in...
changeip -checkhostname
If the DNS is working properly, it should read back the server ip address and your hostname(server.name.com) and say that the DNS is working. If it shows anything else, the DNS is not setup right. As I said I thought my DNS was working correctly, but recieved all sorts of errors when I ran the terminal command above. I discovered that when I had installed the os for the 6th time, maybe 7th I lost track after a while, the setup pulled some DNS hostname info from my isp and had saved that in the system somewhere. With my limited knowledge I was unable to remove that info from the system. So I ended up reinstalling the os again.
One other tip I learned from my research into this. When you install the os onto the server, don't have it hooked up to the internet. If it's going to be a primary OD server, network it like this...
server->switch/hub/router->client machine to test with
You can change how it's hookedup later but this keeps the server from pulling info from elsewhere during the initial setup. If this is going to be a secondary server then you would have it hooked up to the primary server to pull info from.
Hope this helps a bit and I wish you luck.