MOSS SSP Failed to provision - No running instances of Shared Services Provider provisioning job service are online

We ran into an interesting problem on a client installation. The server was running on a Virtual Server environment, everyone our customer would try to provision a Shared Service Provider, the provisioning would fail with the following message "No running instances of Shared Services Provider provisioning job service are online". The ULS trace log and a google search yielded to no hints on a solution.

I remembered a similar issue with Excel service and run the following command

stsadm.exe -o enumservices

and noticed that the service called was set to "Disabled"

<Service>
    <Type>Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.OfficeServerService, Microsoft.Office.Server, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c</Type>
    <Name />
    <DisplayName>SSP Job Control Service</DisplayName>
    <Status>Disabled</Status>
  </Service>

To solve the problem we ran the two following commands:

stsadm.exe -o provisionservice -action stop -servicetype "Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.OfficeServerService, Microsoft.Office.Server, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c"

stsadm.exe -o provisionservice -action start -servicetype "Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.OfficeServerService, Microsoft.Office.Server, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c"

A quick check on the services showed the SSP Job Control Service status to be started

Hope this helps other

FW:MOSS SSP Failed to provision - No running instances of Shared Services Provider provisioning job service are online