I've set it to group "web" several times and it works for a while, then it reverts itself back to "root" again and it is causing issues, because Moodle cannot then create subdirectories beneath it.
Does anyone know what might be causing this? The only thing I can assume is that it's being done at some point during the cron, as I believe the cron runs under the "root" user. Does everyone else run the cron as the root user or as their webserver user?