MOSS 2007 Shared Service Providers stuck on Provisioning in Progress

This was a really annoying glitch during my setup process of Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007. I have a two server farm that I was upgrading to the MOSS 2007 trial (free for 180 days) and was getting stuck while going through the initial setup process when it came time to create a shared service provider. Luckily, after I got frustrated enough, I turned to Google and was able to find an easy solution that fixed my problem right away.

The hang/error is apparently caused by the Sharepoint Timer service, and in order to fix it you must remove the timer service files. This process needs to be repeated on all servers running the Sharepoint Timer service. Here's how to do it:

1. Stop the Sharepoint Timer service. To do this, go to Administrative Tools->Services, then scroll through the list to find it. Select it and choose Stop

2. Now to delete the configuration files for the Sharepoint Timer service. Navigate to %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Application Data\Microsoft\SharePoint\Config\GUID using the Start->Run box (or whatever other method you want to use to traverse the folders). GUID will be a long, random string of numbers, not literally the text GUID.

3. DO NOT delete the cache.ini file, but delete all the other .xml files you find, leaving the cache.ini file intact

4. Right click on cache.ini and choose Open With. Choose to open it with Notepad and change the number value within the file to 0 and save.

5. Restart the Sharepoint Timer service. This can be done very similarly to how you stopped it in step #1, but by clicking on Start this time instead of Stop.

Now you should be able to successfully create a Shared Service Provider. If you already had one that was stuck on "Provisioning in Progress" it should finish at this point since it continues to retry every so often.