OK..In my hunt to resolve this issue I came a cross this Windows Active directory tool to manage users "Ldifde.exe" which I tried to use and to my surprise did not work and the error message was: "No DC available". However, I successfully ran a VBS script (using WinNT provider)from the same PC (w2k) and I was able to add one user to a group.

So I came to a conclution that using LDAP provider my scripts will not work, however they will work if I use WinNT provider.

Maybe I should have mentioned the fact that our local resource domain is still NT4.0 however our global accounts domain is AD (with a local DC at our site).

To add more to this, someone from our AD team has directed me to make the following registry change from where I will run my admin scripts:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlset\services\netlogon\parameters. and add the follwoing Reg_dword "NeutralizeNT4Emulator" with value 1. But that did not help.

Does that make any sense...