SharePoint 2007 Audience not updating and lost majority of members from AD groups?

OK so today someone reported an issue to me with the SharePoint audiences, one particular audience shrank from 400 users to 6.

The first thing to do when this kind of behaviour is experienced is to run a full profile import, and then the membership and BDC import will run minutes afterwards and should import the members of all AD groups into the SSP database.

I tried this solution and the group still showed 6 members when adding it to the audience, after restarting the indexer amongst many other things and multiple imports I was none the wiser.

I decided that there must be an issue with the AD group itself as it was clear SharePoint could not import it, so I modified the group description in AD and then ran another full profile import.

Sure enough, once the BDC/Membership import was complete, I added the AD group back to my Audience and it showed the correct number of members again.

Hopefully this will save someone ruining their afternoon trawling through various blogs and finding no answers!

Cheers,

Conrad