mcx settings slow

Howdy. We're using 10.4.11 server (MERLIN) on an xserve G5 2GHz to roll out mcx settings to about 30 mac clients. When the clients boot up, it can take as long as 3 to 4 minutes (average of probably 2 minutes) for the blue progress bar to go across the screen and get the login screen. No users are authenticating to the osx server. If i disable ldap on the clients teh progress bar takes about 7 seconds reliably if i enable ldap, and take the client out of the managed computer list on the server, the progress bar takes about 13 seconds. if i put the mac back into the list, the long delay comes back. The xserve isn't doing anything else that could slow it down. The ldap log is shing a lot of errors though.... Jan 22 15:30:24 MERLIN slapd[47]: