Today I had a strange problem.

I was at a customer who had both 2003 R2 and 2008 R2 DC's in their domain.

If I created a new GPO on a 2003 DC everything was ok, but if I created the GPO on a 2008 DC the "Administrative Templates" was empty.

It turned out to be because there was created an empty folder called "PolicyDefinitions" on the domain.local\sysvol\domaon.local\policies share.

When the GPMC opens a policy it will look for the ADMX files in "C:\Windows\PolicyDefinitions" execpt for if the "domain.local\sysvol\domaon.local\policies\PolicyDefinitions" folder exists. This is a central store for Policies.

If the "domain.local\sysvol\domaon.local\policies\PolicyDefinitions" folder exists it will load the ADMX files from there but if the folder is empty it will not show anything "Administrative Templates".

To solve the problem I just copied all the files from the "C:\Windows\PolicyDefinitions" folder to the "domain.local\sysvol\domaon.local\policies\PolicyDefinitions" folder.