I am setting up a staging network complete with a whole new domain. I have decided to use Server 2008. (I'll add that currently this network is run inside of a VMWare ESX environment, but that shouldn't make a difference). My problem is, when i join new 2008 servers to the domain, my domain admin account that I created does not have admin rights. It looks like it has rights with a 2003 server joined to the domain, but 2008 just will not accept domain admin privileges from AD. The only difference that I see between the 2008 and 2003 servers is that XXXDOMAIN\Domain Admins is automatically listed in the builtin administrators group on the 2003 servers, but not the 2008. If i try and add XXXDOMAIN\Domain Admins on server 2008, it says it is already a member when I apply. I assume that since DA's are implicitly local admins, they just stopped having it list the group on server 2008. Am I missing something here? I have tried re-joining the servers to the domain, and re-adding the account to AD. Any ideas?