  We show that for a string moving in a background consisting of maximally
symmetric gravity, dilaton field and second rank antisymmetric tensor field,
the $O(d) \otimes O(d)$ transformation on the vacuum solutions gives
inequivalent solutions that are not maximally symmetric. We then show that the
usual physical meaning of maximal symmetry can be made to remain unaltered even
if torsion is present and illustrate this through two toy models by determining
the torsion fields, the metric and Killing vectors. Finally we show that under
the $O(d) \otimes O(d)$ transformation this generalised maximal symmetry can be
preserved under certain conditions. This is interesting in the context of
string related cosmological backgrounds.
