Jerry, try "ntpdate -u time.apple.com" and have a look at the -u option in the ntpdate man page. When you use -d, it implicitly sets -u, which your non-"-d" invocation didn't. That's probably the reason for the difference.
Cheers Tony
Tony - your correct. That did work. the odd thing also is doing "ntpdate pool.ntp.org" works every time, and so does time.windows.com - but time.apple.com did not.
Thanks for the "-u" suggestion.
Jerry