samba - Nov 2009 - smbpasswd refuses to add a user if the UID exists somewhere in LDAP

All the experts.

We have been running samba 3.0.xx (currently at 3.0.28a) on RHEL 4 with 
LDAP back end for a few years now.  It has been working well for us.

Now we are having a little problem. I am not sure if the behavior we see 
is by design or a bug.

In smb.conf

We have:
ldap suffix = o=COMPANY,c=US
ldap user suffix = ou=People

The LDAP database also has an ou=Terms tree for people who have 
terminated employment with the company.  The entries on the ou=Terms 
tree has a uid attribute.

When we rehire people, we would like to give them the same UID as 
before.  We can add the new user with recycled uid to the ou=People 
tree.  But when we run smbpasswd -a uid to make the user also a Samba 
user, smbpasswd returns an error saying the UID is already used.

The entries in Terms are not of posixAccount class and they do not have 
the "ldap user suffix" specified in smb.conf.  Is smbpasswd supposed
to
refuse to make the user a Samba user?

It is not a big deal for us. We can just give the rehires a new UID.  
But it would be nice to know this is a bug or not.

Thanks,

John