OK, I believe the dead-lock issue is solved, however OCCASIONALLY when attempting a restart or stop of the slapd process, it throws an error saying 'slapd stop failed', however the slapd process does quit as expected, so its a "false failure".
The one possibility for the reason this is happening, aside from blaming slapd, is that my two test boxes are VMs ... so I kind of expect sluggish responses, especially on a VMware server as busy as ours. I will note that our production LDAP servers are NOT VMs and will never be ;-)
I believe you were correct, Pierangelo. I will post my findings over the next fews days to keep everyone in the loop.
Thanks,
Jeff