10.5 portable home sync rules not being respected on the client...

Question

Portable home syncing is working great for me on my Tiger server and clients, and I'm an old hat at Apple server and OD.... However in my test environment for 10.5, my client machines reuse to respect the rules that I've set in 10.5 Server Workgroup Manager for portable home syncing. I was hoping 10.5.2 would fix this for me, but no luck....
I can tell that the clients are bound to the OD and are reading the MCX settings from the server, because I can change the sync time interval, and that is being reflected on the client. WGM is set to NOT allow settings to be merged with user's settings, so I can eliminate the client settings as a variable.
Both Login/Logout and background sync are effected by this problem.
Is anyone else having this issue?

Answer 1

Bruce's solution above does indeed work. However, I must have stared at his answer for 20 minutes trying to figure out what he was talking about. Undoubtedly, my inability to initially parse his solution comes from my more basic understanding of OS X Server. Since there are likely others out there with this same Home Sync problem and my same level of experience with OS X Server I wanted to give Bruce's answer again but with more detail.
The problem, as explained by the original post, is that Home Sync settings for a user or group aren't necessarily respected. For example, if I were to open Workgroup Manager (WGM), select myself as a user (Berylium), click Preferences, select Mobility from the Overview tab, and select the Rules tab I would be in the Home Sync preferences. If I tell the Login & Logout Sync tab to Always do what I select and then I uncheck the Sync at login and logout checkbox one would expect that when I log in or log out I would not see a Home Sync dialog popup and perform a sync operation - but I did.
The issue as Bruce explains occurs because of another setting I have enabled, Background Sync, and a quirk (bug?) in Leopard Server. I have Background Sync enabled, set to Always, and told to sync in the background my ~/Documents and ~/Desktop folders. Leopard Server, it seems, performs the following operation when I login or logout:
1. Is Login & Logout Sync enabled? No, ok skip this part.
2. Is Background Sync enabled? Yes! Ok, sync the background sync items now even though this is a login or log out.
Clever, Apple. Ok, now that the problem has been explained let's get to the solution.
1. Open WGM, select your problem user or group, click Preferences, and select the Details tab
2. Click the +, navigate to /System/Library/CoreServices/, select ManagedClient, and click Add
- At this point, at least in my installation, several more items appeared in the preference editor list.
3. Select Home Sync in the preference editor list then click the Edit button (looks like a pencil)
4. Expand the Always list item
- Obviously, this is where some people's solution could begin to differ from mine. You may want to edit items in the Once or Often list items.
5. Click the New Key button, a New Item will be created and selected, click New Item and select Sync Background Set During Login from the list.
6. Change the Value item for Sync Background Set During Login from automatic to dontSync
7. Repeat steps 5 and 6 but select Sync Background Set During Logout
8. Click Apply Now followed by Done
Now you should be all set. Thank you Bruce for the solution to this problem and I hope someone else finds my more detailed explanation helpful.
-Berylium