Ghosted Domain after removal? Reboot the PDC Emulator

Working with a client today, the problem reported was “I deleted a domain trust and domain over a week ago, yet it persists/exists in ‘Domains and Trusts” still.  Help!

We went through the motions he pointed out that he had already done of

1. Can’t remove it from the GUI (in Domains and Trusts) with the error “a trusted-domain object cannot be found for the trust to domain”
2. Can’t find it in NTDSUTIL, so can’t delete it there either using this Microsoft KB Article
3. Can’t delete with NETDOM using this syntax either:

netdom trust domain.com /Domain:orphaneddomain.com /Oneside:trusted /remove /force

A quick Google suggested a theme of…

1. It seems to go away after a few days (?)
2. Rebooting the Domain Controller with the PDC Emulator role solves the problem (which is probably what happened with #1, for those dudes

The Solution?

We rebooted the PDC Emulator and sure enough the domain was gone when it returned.  Well, that was easy (if not a little lame).  Appears the PDC Emulator caches stuff. Bad PDC Emulator. Bad.