Another permission issue often found in SharePoint production env

Often in production deployment of SharePoint, the people and the accounts used to install and configure the SharePoint server farm itself are different from the ones responsible for further setting up the services on the server. For example, when using an administrator account that's not the one used to create the SSP to configure the services in the SSP, an error of "Access Denied" is encountered, even when the account is a server admin, farm admin, and the SSP site collection admin. What's missing is the "Personalization Services Permissions" right in the SSP (last item under User Profiles and My Sites). The user account must have all the permissions in this SharePoint category to perform operations like User Profile configuration and My Site Settings configuration.