In short, a lot of what you do in the SSP admin console is executed through OWSTimer jobs.  There is a known issue on 64 bit systems that can result in an exception being thown and the service will shutdown.  From there what can happen is that whatever the job or jobs that are being executed may not finish and introduce an inconsistent state.  For example, changing the password for service accounts causes access denied or 403 errors.

 If you apply the following hotfix it should prevent future problems.  You should definitly apply this Windows fix before applying Service Pack 1 or making any changes to the SSP.  If you do not do this you place your SSP at risk.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946517 - Fix to correct  6482 Timer job Heap Corruption Issue on 64 bit system

 

Common Jobs Completed by the OWSTIMER service that contribute to SSP Services :
Application Server Timer Job - Manages the Search service instance (SearchServiceInstance) on Basic deployments.
Application Server Administration Service Timer Job - Manages the Search service instance (SearchServiceInstance) on non-Basic deployments.
Shared Services Provider Synchronizing Job - Provisions and synchronizes SSPs.
Shared Services Timer Job - Executes shared application jobs in the security context of the SSP web service account. Might result in User Profile processing issues.
Indexing Schedule Manager on <index server name> - A MOSS Search SharePoint timer job that kicks off scheduled crawls.
Child farm content source discovery - A MOSS Search SharePoint timer job that runs on child farms, discovers web applications and registers them in the SSP database. Later on, the synchronizer on the central farm configures the default content source with a start address per registered child web application.
SharePoint Services Search Refresh - Automatically changes and self heals the configuration of the WSS Search service.
Config Refresh - A SharePoint job that runs on all servers. It refreshes the server cache, i.e. updates it with changes from the SharePoint Configuration
 
You might also see this problem.
  • Event ID's 7076, 6398 and 6432
  • In SharePoint Server 2007, tasks that are scheduled do not run.
  • When you try to manage IIS 6.0 by using Server Manager, you receive a blank page, or you receive the following error message: "the path specified cannot be used at this time".