Quanah,
What was the last OpenLDAP version this worked on, server side?
After you sent me the pointer to the other ITS, I started trying various combinations of ldapmodify and openldap backends to see if I could successfully perform this update. Unfortunately, I have yet to make it work. We first noticed this problem about a five weeks ago. At the time, we were running openldap on a debian etch server (openldap 2.3.30). It looks like the package we were running was from late Oct. 2008, so I suspect this operation never would have worked in our environment and we just finally hit some threshold.
Sorry I can't be of more help.
Mark