This seems to be a common issue. Here's an MSDN thread on it,
social.technet.microsoft.com/.../thr
ead/8ede2f40-2b11-416b-b426-51c1b6479c33

I was on call with MS support for 3 hrs and they are able to replicate the
issue. I was asked to install Cumulative updates ( June) and reconfigure
User Profile Service Application.

The issue is still open but we are able to see the AD groups in the database
"Profile DB" but not on the "Manage User Profiles"

I was having an issue with the User Profile Sync not importing users from
Active Directory. I tried configuring the connection to point to different
containers, but nothing seemed to work. Out of desperation I had one of the
domain admins enter their domain credentials, and then try to run the
profile sync. I was surprised that the import succeeded. So it has me
wondering what level of permissions the User Profile Sync account needs.
Using a domain admin account is not an option, but was just a test to see if
the issue was permissions related. I'm going to do some more testing
tomorrow to see if i can find anything else.

Read through this blog post,
http://www.harbar.net/articles/sp2010ups.aspx Spence walks through
exactly what permissions your user needs.

thanks for the info, I'll give it a try in the morning