MacBook won't bind, won't sync to NTP server

I have lots of towers and imacs and intels bound to OD, no problems.. and have some new MacBooks that I'm setting up. Most went fine.. one just wont do it.

nothing different about it.. it goes through the whole process normally but when restarted, shows "network accts unavailable" , dscl shows "invalid path" , no contacts, etc... when deleting the bind, " can't contact the LDAP server"

record in LDAP looks fine, connection looks fine, tried reserved DHCP and static IP .. verified DNS, hostname, ethernet ID, aarrgghh
I do notice that it can't set time to my NTP (?? the error in log is 'resolved the NTP host, cant find ntp server to synchronize to' ) but it can set time to apple.time.com and all the other machines on the network can (and do) set to my NTP..
and I think this is an important clue

IF I manually set the clock properly, I can get user ticket (via kinit)
but still no LDAP..

any suggestions
(since it's new, I can always restore from scratch, but I really want to know what's up)