I can now reliably reproduce this problem in 2.4.21 and 2.4.20 on a multi-master setup that only has five entries: 1. Stop service on server A. 2. Delete one entry on server B. 3. Start service on server A. After step 3, the entry is never deleted from server A.
Please file an ITS at http://www.openldap.org/its/ with the exact instructions to reproduce as you've nicely outlined here. ;)
--Quanah -- Quanah Gibson-Mount Principal Software Engineer Zimbra, Inc -------------------- Zimbra :: the leader in open source messaging and collaboration