In case anyone is seeing the same thing with staff not there … we reinstalled Tiger onto the server (previously we had just upgraded it) and then staff was present. Our machine had kept its settings over from 10.2 through 10.3 to 10.4 so the problem may have been something to do with that and possibly the GUID although I can’t pretend to know if that is really true.
It did not have anything to do with the permissions problems we were seeing though.