the core issue turned out to be the no longer supported config option auth_require=false,
which interferes with the group authorization infrastructure.
john, could you please run the nmis support tool and email its output to us at support@opmantek.com?
i've just fired up a plain blank test system with nmis 8.5.10G, and couldn't reproduce the problem you describe; but i hope that the support data collector will help us diagnose what exactly is going wrong here.
Sent. Thanks for the help!
Adding a group seems to work fine by itself via Setup->Add/Edit Groups and populates in the config file. However, when editing a device, the Groups drop down has no entries at all.
Reinstall has been tried and nmis.pl type=audit shows no problems.
Any help would be appreciated, if we can make this work in our test environment we will very likely move forward with it and buy a support contract.