System.InvalidOperationException - Cannot start the service SPAdmin on computer

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 While creating a new SharePoint 2007 SP3 farm with one of my customers, both WFE servers and the App server complained of failures during the running of the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard.

The first error, which all three of the SP servers complained about, seems to have been caused by an inability to start the SharePoint Admin service. 

The error was:

SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard

Configuration Failed

One or more configuration settings failed. Completed configuration settings will not be rolled back. Resolve the problem and run this configuraiton wizard again. The following contains detailed information about the failure:   Failed to create the configuration database.

An exception of the type System.InvalidOperationException was thrown. Additional exception information: Cannot start the service SPAdmin on computer '.'.

To diagnose the problem, review the applicaton event log and the configuration log file . . . PSCDiagnostics....log

 

The log file just said what we already knew: "An exception of type System.InvalidOperationException was thrown.  Additional exception information: Cannot start service SPAdmin on computer '.'."

When we tried to start the Windows SharePoint Services Administration service, it wouldn't start and gave this error: 1053 service did not respond in a timely fashion.  Error1053 : service did not respond to the start request in a timely fashion Cannot start service SPAdmin on computer ‘.’

But the configuration database was created, contrary to the error. 

In line with kb 916894 we changed the Network DTC Access to allow remote clients, restarted DTC, disjoined the servers from the farm, deleted the configdb, and ran the config wizards again.  But we got the same errors on all three servers. This didn't help at all.

We restarted the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard on the first server and it completed without any errors. The first server was able to run Central Admin just fine and everything looked good. The SharePoint Admin service started without any problem.  We ran the config wizard on the
second and third servers and they too completed without any complaint.  But the second and third servers did not show up in the list of servers in the farm from Central Admin's view. 

We disjoined all three servers from the farm, deleted the config-db and centraladmin-db and started over.  We ran into the same problem on all three servers--the SharePoint admin service wouldn't start and the wizard complained in the same way.

We ran [%Program Files%\CommonFiles\Microsoft Shared\Web server extensions\12\BIN\psconfig -cmd upgrade-force -inplace b2b] -wait on the first server and then the SharePoint admin service started up fine.  The wizard completed fine. 

We ran the psconfig upgrade command on the second and third servers (after they gave their first error) and then we were able to start up the SharePoint admin service on them too.   We completed the config wizards and so far everything looks healthy.

Didn't get to determine the real root cause for this problem.  Hopefully this helps somebody else.