Windows Server host name mismatch after startup repair

In all my experience of working out server and domain issues I’ve never seen anything quite like this one so I thought I’d share. I recently had a 2008 R2 server that lost its domain trust relationship after a startup repair and still gave the message “The trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed” after rejoining it to the domain. In this case the displayed computer name was the same as it had been given, yet it was creating a computer account in Active Directory as one of the WINxxxxxxxx randomly generated names they get during installation. Only after renaming the server to something completely different and back to the original name again was I able to successfully rejoin it and log in using a domain account. This is the first time I’ve ever seen a Windows Server appear to have one host name in all the system properties dialogs yet register another in Active Directory, so here’s a heads up!