Quote Originally Posted by insuredjester View Post
The short version is that when I run the TAR command with -xvf as root the extracted files show up in a directory owned by a different user and a numerical group
Root should not be jacked. You are running "tar" as root instead of a regular user. You activated the safety mechanism which prevents possible damage to the root account.

use tar -oxvf instead of -xvf. This will always make your files belong to user root and group root.