We ran into this at one point. In our case, it turned out that LDAP cannot read a user password that contains special (!@#&* etc.)characters. Novell is working on it. Try resetting the password to something simple and try it again. This is one possible solution.
Also, try different forms of the context, ie .admin.novell.us, cn=admin.ou=novell.o=us, etc., along with the simplified password.