I had this problem that I first noticed when a users profile picture was not being updated. He had updated his pic on his MySite but it would not appear on “People and Groups” inside the top level Site Collection.
The next day I attempted to back up (using Central Admin) my farm and it just sat there at initializing. I checked the timer jobs and noticed that nothing had run since this was installed. A quick search on Bing and Google suggested clearing the cache. That didn’t work for me, but in summary, I’ll repost from here:
1. Stop the Timer service. To do this, follow these steps:
Click Start, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Services.
Right-click Windows SharePoint Services Timer, and then click Stop.
2. Clear the cache. To do this, follow these steps:
Open the following folder: %ALLUSERSPROFILE% \Application Data\Microsoft\SharePoint\Config\
Open the cache.ini file and change the value to 1. Save the change and close the cache.ini file.
3. Delete or move all of the XML files.
4. Start the Timer service. To do this, follow these steps:
Click Start, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Services.
Right-click Windows SharePoint Services Timer, and then click Start.
OK, so that may work for some people. Just a note, on Windows Server 2008 (my deployment) the location for step 2 is actually:
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\SharePoint\Config\
As I said though, that didn’t work. There were no event log errors and nothing obvious in the ULS (honestly didn’t look that hard), I was pulling my hair out. Well, I found out that the password for the farm account had been changed. Apparently, after changing it, no one ran the STSADM command:
stsadm -o updatefarmcredentials -userlogin DOMAIN\UserName -password NewPassword
I found that on a blog post by Ricardo Costa. He had a link to Microsoft’s KB article KB934838: How to change service accounts and service account passwords in SharePoint Server 2007 and in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
Isn’t that a nice title?
That didn’t entirely fix my problem still. The backup did run, so I’m happy for now but there are alot of errors.
While I’m on the subject of changing passwords, I am seeing many organizations (like DoD or non-profits) enforcing 90 day password changes. I think if you followed Microsofts Best Practices for service accounts (Plan for administrative and service accounts), that should suffice. Changed service account passwords are a hassle!