I'm not sure if that article is
relevant, as we never did import users in bulk in our
test environment. The Profile page looks exactly the
same between the two installs. One difference, is
that the newer install is hosted on a server, in a
clustered environment, and that cluster may be
"talking" to a different node in Active
Directory...(this aspect of Sharepoint and servers
isn't really my usual area of expertise, sorry I might
not be explaining this correctly. As mentioned I did
not participate in either insall, just trying to pick
up the pieces!)
In either case, I can still give users permissions, so
I'm not dead in the water, I just have to manually
enter in either their domain user account name or
their e-mail address, and their display name each
time, where before it was all done automatically.