Finding other unanswered posts relating to home directory problems, I think I found the problem and a workaround.
Apparently (perhaps only under a Master/Slave scenario?), after LDAP master is populated and then slave is synced and then file sharing is enabled, users are created and user profile (for roaming profiles) are created under /home/samba/profiles/[username] and ./[username.V2] BUT no user directory is created under /home/. I was fooled into thinking one of the previously mentioned profile directories was supposed to be the users home.
Looking at log and conf files confirmed there were supposed to be directories created under /home/. When I create the appropriately name directory and changed ownership and permissions, everything is working as it should.
Since this is a workaround to an apparent bug(?), and not a solution per-se, I am renaming the thread "... [BUG? - WORKAROUND]. If I am wrong in this assessment, please let me know how it is not a bug and what I may have done wrong.
Thanks,
David