holy crap!! it was the extra colon that killed it! found it, fixed it.. man oh man sorry for the intrusion!
Yeah, :: on userPassword means it is base-64 encoded already, and clearly that bit of LDIF was not base-64 encoded. ;)
--Quanah -- Quanah Gibson-Mount Principal Software Engineer Zimbra, Inc -------------------- Zimbra :: the leader in open source messaging and collaboration