Thanks once again for your reply. I downloaded MS's GPMC.msi and installed to have a look at whats going on but still came back with not a great deal, I also tried your suggestion but the same problems still occur. The GPMC looked as though things were a lil messed up and i checked sharing & security permissions on the SYSVOL share with a surprise... the shares were only to the system itself. So I tried manually adding permissions but still had not effect.
I found there have been soooo many articles on this subject before thats someone should release a whole new service pack for just this problem ;-P And as i've found no real solution to the problem I guess I should try reinstalling AD. :-\