Active Directory group policies are randomly not applying to clients

Hello,
We are running Windows 2000 Active Directory Servers with XP clients.
We have 3 Servers that are running as DC's + 5 other servers.

I have been crawling through all the MS material i could find but none of it seems to help,...

I am having problems with replication with our main DC server. I think this in turn may be causing group policies to not apply to client pc’s( or i suspect)
Server 2 and 3 replicate with each other without any problems.
Server 1 however does not want to play the replication game! Neither server 2 nor 3 will grab data from 1. I have tried manually copying the policies ect from 1 to 2 and 3 to try and sync the process in case this is what was causing the problem.
This didn’t help and just gave date creation mismatch errors.

Now when I run GPOTOOL it says:
Policy {FD842082-97C3-4640-9CDD-60653D0DB048}
Error: Cannot access \\server2.soc.tas.edu.au\sysvol\soc.tas.edu.au\policies\{FD842-082-97C3-4640-9CDD-60653D0DB048}, error 2
Error: Cannot access \\server3.soc.tas.edu.au\sysvol\soc.tas.edu.au\policies\
{FD842082-97C3-4640-9CDD-60653D0DB048}, error 2

On server1 under event viewer it has the following error under File Replication Service:
Event Type:      Error
Event Source:      NtFrs
Event Category:      None
Event ID:      13568
Date:            2/09/2003
Time:            10:07:56 AM
User:            N/A
Computer:      SERVER1
Description:
The File Replication Service has detected that the replica set "DOMAIN SYSTEM VOLUME (SYSVOL SHARE)" is in JRNL_WRAP_ERROR.
 
 Replica set name is    : "DOMAIN SYSTEM VOLUME (SYSVOL SHARE)"
 Replica root path is   : "c:\winnt\sysvol\domain"
 Replica root volume is : "\\.\C:"
 A Replica set hits JRNL_WRAP_ERROR when the record that it is trying to read from the NTFS USN journal is not found.

I have tested replication by copying a file to the sysvol share on server1 called server1.txt and on server2 called server2.txt and on server3 a file called server3.txt.
Server2 ended up with server2 and 3 files on it as did server 3. Server1's file did not replicate to any other servers and it also did not receive the files from the other servers.

On server 2 and 3 in the event log we get:
The File Replication Service is having trouble enabling replication from SERVER1 to SERVER2 for c:\winnt\sysvol\domain using the DNS name server1.soc.tas.edu.au. FRS will keep retrying.
 Following are some of the reasons you would see this warning.
 
 [1] FRS can not correctly resolve the DNS name server1.soc.tas.edu.au from this computer.
 [2] FRS is not running on server1.soc.tas.edu.au.
 [3] The topology information in the Active Directory for this replica has not yet replicated to all the Domain Controllers.
 
 This event log message will appear once per connection, After the problem is fixed you will see another event log message indicating that the connection has been established.

On cient pc’s event log we get:
Event Type:      Error
Event Source:      Userenv
Event Category:      None
Event ID:      1058
Date:            3/09/2003
Time:            9:02:52 AM
User:            SOC\frente
Computer:      NETWORKOFFICER
Description:
Windows cannot access the file gpt.ini for GPO CN={047EB295-9725-4152-8C06-F65A4A67B200},CN=Policies,CN=System,DC=soc,DC=tas,DC=edu,DC=au. The file must be present at the location <\\soc.tas.edu.au\SysVol\soc.tas.edu.au\Policies\{047EB295-9725-4152-8C06-F65A4A67B200}\gpt.ini>. (The system cannot find the path specified. ). Group Policy processing aborted.

Which is “apparently” a smb error. I downloaded the patch and installed it and it didn’t fix it. This is causing the group policies to not apply on most computers. It even gives this error message on a clean install of XP just added to the domain.

So i guess i need to fix some sort of trust relationship between server1 and server2+server3 and i want group policies to to start applying to client machines

I would give this a bigger point value, but its all i have :-(

Thanks for any help!