dreaded ‘unable to login’ ‘home folder located on an afp or smb’ new emacs

I really hope someone has the answer. We purchased 11 new emacs at our school. tried unsuccessfully to set up one ‘master’ machine, and image the others, so decided to go ahead and set up each one individually. These are to be teachers machines, so far they are all logging in to their accounts from our computer lab, 10.3.9 machines. Server running X server, 10.4.7 OD master, file serving only. new emacs running 10.4.7. My problem is that on 3 of the machines, adding ldap in Directory Access worked beautifully. I have tried unsuccessfully to get 4 others to allow login to the server. I get the message of ‘you are unable to login at this time. the homefolder is located on an afp or smb server’ etc. The accounts work fine from the computer lab, or from one of the 3 successful emacs. I have checked and re checked the server name, added and deleted the server in the ldap section of directory access, added with FQDN and tried adding by IP address instead. Searches online for this problem bring up an earlier problem with 10.3, solved by an update (?) but I have tried removing some network cache files from info from a post here, no luck. Another post said to run the command ‘hostname’ in terminal, and make sure it was the FQDN of the server. IT IS NOT – the command hostname returns the name of the computer – but I don’t know what to do to solve this. Also trying to connect to the server after login locally gives a kerberos error (sorry, I didn’t write that one down). I know I have set up the machines exactly the same way, one of the emacs that is now working refused to login, but after a few reboots something fixed itself. No such luck with the others. I am stumped.