Oooh, you wascally job timer, you!

The SSP Timer Job Distribution List Import Job was not run.

Reason: Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password

...Every.
...Five.
...Minutes.

It's hard to think of a more often-discussed SP error than the SSP Timer Job failure message. This error shows up in the server's event log every five minutes, oftentimes in pairs. If you take a look at the security log, you should see an associated 529 error (or two) with the reason: Unknown user name or bad password, and the user name of the account used for your SP site's shared services provider.

It's an easy password change to miss, and it may be that you've just not gotten the new password into all the right places the last time it was changed. A number of forum posts advise that you run the following from the STSADM command line (at %COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin):

stsadm -o updatefarmcredentials [-userlogin] [-password]

stsadm -o updateaccountpassword -userlogin -password

...Followed by an IISRESET. In a lot of cases, this will catch any password changes you didn't get to manually through Central Admin, and solve the problem.

I found that it wasn't clearing the problem on my server, however. Poking around some more, I found a post that suggested an additional step: in Central Admin, check to make sure you've added your Shared Services account to the "Process Accounts with access to this SSP" box in the configuration menu.

OHHHHHHH.

Sure enough, that took care of it! You just have to:

*Open Central Administration
*Click on the 'Shared Services Administration' link
*Click the drop-down menu for the name of your SSP, and select 'edit properties'
*Enter the new password in the 'SSP Service Credentials' section, for good measure
*Enter the SSP username in the 'Process Accounts with access to this SSP' section
*Click OK
*Perform an IISRESET

That did the trick!