LIU PENG'S BLOG

The information is also available in Microsoft KB article 833883.

You cannot view a user's Universal Group membership in Windows Server 2003 Active Directory Users and Computers when Universal Groups do not reside in the local domain

When you use the Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in, and you click the Membership tab on the user's Properties dialog box to view the Universal Group membership for a specific user, only the universal groups that reside in the local domain are shown. If the user also belongs to universal groups that do not reside on the local domain, these universal groups do not appear in the Membership tab of the user's Properties dialog box, even when the non-local domain resides in the same forest and you are connected to a global catalog server in the local domain.

In order to overcome this issue, we need to modify registry in the client we are using to bring up Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in tool, as shown below:

A caveat to doing this modification is that you may experience slowness in response of Active Directory Users and Computers snap-in tool, since it has now to enumerate the external groups that the user is member of.