Groups and Permissions: Nested UNIX groups
Solution 1:
I'm not suggesting that you do it this way, but I've gotten around this problem by using Active Directory to manage my centralized authentication and implemented Likewise Open to authenticate my Linux machines. LWO gives a consistent UID and GID across all machines because they're based on a hash. This makes things like NFS and rsync very easy to deal with. It also solves nested groups nicely.
Are you using any sort of centralized authentication like NIS or LDAP?