LDAP plugin oddity (change from 10.3 to 10.4)

Question

We have a custom LDAP mapping to take advantage of MS AD infrastructure. We don't use the AD plugin because we have a hybrid environment and we want different home folders when someone logs in to a mac and a PC.
We were very pleased with our setup under 10.3 because we used variable substitution to get the MS "Office" attribute (physicalDeliveryOfficeName) into the name of the server that the user's home was located on.
On 10.3.4 (up to 10.3.9) when physicalDeliveryOfficeName was mapped into "City" we could also use variable substitution in the "HomeDirectory" along the lines of "#<home_Dir><url>afp://machomes$physicalDeliveryOfficeName$/..." etc
But this has stopped working in 10.4. The substituted in data is blank.
The variable substitution into "HomeDirectory" only works with AD fields that have been mapped into very basic attributes already (RecordName, UniqueID, RealName). Obviously we can't use these attributes as "bridging" attributes (like we could with "City") to sub in the text we want.
Are we missing a step to make the variable subbing work? or is this some new feature of aggresive lookup caching?
Thanks for any pointers on this
Desktop G5s   Mac OS X (10.4.5)  
Desktop G5s    

Answer 1

I have to cox.net accounts in Mail. When I switched a few days ago from 10.3 to 10.4, only a few recent emails showed up in my inboxes in 10.4. All of my Sent messages were intact. And of the few emails that showed up in the in boxes, this message appeared in the body area:
"The message from Skye Knotts <[email protected]> concerning “New quarterly access code from Equifax” has not been downloaded from the server. You need to take this account online in order to download it."
So the message was lost even though the email itself remained. But hundreds of other emails did not transfer to 10.4. I don't know how to retrieve them.
I am receiving and sending emails just fine, however.