I don't know how to resolve your current problem, but this is what I did to get AD authentication working on my esx servers (all of this is done in my post install script when I build the esx server):

esxcfg-auth --enablead --addomain your.domain -addc dc.your.domain --krb5realm your.domain --krb5kdc dc.your.domain --krb5adminserver dc.your.domain
esxcfg-auth --passmaxdays=0

I also did the following:

echo "#%PAM-1.0" > /etc/pam.d/vmware-authd
echo "auth sufficient /lib/security/pam_unix_auth.so shadow nullok" >> /etc/pam.d/vmware-authd
echo "auth required /lib/security/pam_krb5.so use_first_pass" >> /etc/pam.d/vmware-authd
echo "auth sufficient /lib/security/pam_ldap.so" >> /etc/pam.d/vmware-authd
echo "account sufficient /lib/security/pam_unix_acct.so" >> /etc/pam.d/vmware-authd
echo "account sufficient /lib/security/pam_ldap.sok" >> /etc/pam.d/vmware-authd

I'm not sure what all this does (I found it in another post in the forums), but it seems to get everything working for me.

To get the user accounts mapped, all you need to do is the following:

/usr/sbin/useradd userid

Make sure that "userid" is the same spelling as the AD userid.

I hope this helps.

Ant