Domain Join operation was not successful. Access Denied !

Hello,

I am facing a weired problem while adding a Server to our domain.

I get following following error message:

"The join operation was not successful. The could be because an existing computer account having the name xxxx was previously created using a different set of credentials. Use a different computer name or contact your administrator to remove any stale conflicting raccount. The error was: Access is denied."

Environment: Windows Server 2008 Ent 64 bit SP2.

Though I am not the Domain Admin, I do have Account Operator rights across the forest/domain.

I tried following things but in vain:

Disabled firewall and tried to join server to the domain, no luck.

Changed the host name of the server, took a reboot and tried to join the machine to the domain however, I still get same error.

I could see a machine account created in AD with the host name specified by me ( I am damn sure, it wasn't there before), deleted the account from domain and made sure that any dns records existed in all our GCs are removed. When I repeated the procedure, account got created in AD but I got aforementioned error.

Later on, I recreated a machine account in AD and gave rights to my domain account to join on to the domain and tried adding the machine to the domain however, issue still persists.

This Server is a VM and it was deployed from a VM template. Initially I thought it could be due to SID duplication, I ran sysprep on the problematic server and rebooted but I still get same error message.

Finally, I requested my domain admin to join this server to the domain however, no luck at all, we are back at square one !

The only option I have is to rebuild the server but I don't wish to do that at present.

Any inputs on this issue would be really appreciated.

Thanks