Strange ownership issues

[Jay Shampur]

I've recently installed a Red Hat ES3 Update5 on a Compaq Proliant
box.  There are only two accounts defined at the moment: darryl and
mysql.

I logged in as root, unzipped a tarball in /root folder, and this
tarball uncompressed into a folder. So far, so good.  The wierd part
is that this new folder - which did not exist prior me uncompressing -
has the owner darryl group darryl.

I know I did not su into this account or otherwise - also various
folders which were created when I installed Apache 1.3.33 from source
and other software, have their ownership set to various other groups
such as mysql, games etc.,

I have not found any pattern in this - can anyone help?

Thanks, Jay