User Profiles not in sync with site collections after a name / property change

At one of our customers we had a sync problem with the user profiles and the wss 3.0 user profile store on site collection level. To check which content databases were out of sync we used the common
stsadm -o sync -listolddatabases 5

This shows a list of all the databases that are out of sync. By using
stsadm –o sync –deleteolddatabases 5
you can delete those userprofilesync databases (not the content database itself and by then running something like)
stsadm –o sync –synctiming M:5
stsadm –o sync –sweeptiming M:5

you should see your userprofile syncing in 5 minutes. Except for the fact that in this case it didn’t do the trick. Whenever I used domain\username in the people picker, it resolved to the old username and not the new one. Some blogs talk about a full server restart, but as it is a large production environment (and the fact that the issue isn’t realy blocking business) that was not an option. In the end, adding the user with the domain\accountname to a SharePoint group it resolved to the old name. However, 5 minutes later the old name was replaced with the new name and the profile was in sync again. So if the stsadm command doesn’t get it in sync, add the user to one of your site collection groups and it will sync afterwards.