network home folder hosed

Symptom: When I browse to my network OD user homes folder, at /Servers/thefly.local/Users, Finder permanently beachballs. At that point Force Quit Apps is also not available and I have to hard crash and restart. (Bad.) Additional symptoms: Workgroup Manager cannot create new user homes when creating new users. Mobile accounts cannot sync. Kerberos cannot authenticate. (Bad, bad.) However: If I browse directly to /Users, there is no beachball. Possible cause: in setting up DNS services, I created several zone entries. These entries, although since deleted via the Server Admin tool, continue to pop up in /automount/Servers. (And despite the fact that I turned DNS services off.) One of the zones that I had created a was called thefly.local, same as my local server address ('thefly' being the server's name). I am theorizing that this may have created a conflicting/redundant automount--since an OSX machine always has an automount called machinename.local--that is causing some kind of nasty, infinite loop. Does my theory make any sense? Do the symptoms sounds familiar to anyone? Any advice on removing automounts? I am running OSXS 10.4.10. Happy to supply more details. My OSX Server is effectively hobbled until the network User folder is working again.