by Mark Rice.
I checked all that you wrote and verified in my ldap that I can query the correct users within my moodleusers OU. I guess the bottom line is that I am unable to change the OU from OU=staff to OU=Moodleusers or anything for that matter without generating the condition in my original post about the potential coding error and dropping the table. So my issue may be more of a coding issue in MySQL or elsewhere.
I appreciate your post / time and learned some things about ldap and my current directory.