More error message battles

I left things alone, and, well, that was a mistake. Errors 6398 and 6481 came back. This time with an Error 6482 as well.

To resolve 6482:
(I had same symptoms of no longer being able to launch IIS manager - this began after applying windows updates last week.) I installed hotfix from KB946517 and that cleared up 6482.

Once 6482 was resolved, I was still getting 6398 and 6481 and found that I also could not edit Search settings in Central Admin. If I clicked on Search Administration, I would get the dreaded: Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040D1B.

To get the Central Admin pages working again, I:
Went to Central Administation > Application Management > Manage this Farm's Shared Services. Clicked the drop down on the default SSP and clicked edit properties. I re-entered my credentials and specified my local server as the index server.

Since doing that, I can now get to the Shared Services Administration > Search Administration pages. A crawl is running now. Currently I do NOT have 6398 and 6481 errors occurring, but I know from experience, that they will likely re-appear tomorrow.

This is a great article, and I tried all the options previously except adding my service account to Backup Operators group on my sharepoint server. Ive just done that. Let's wait and see.