Searching google groups for "failed to create portal successfully" group:microsoft.public.sharepoint.portalserver.* returns 120 results

"portal creation failed" group:microsoft.public.sharepoint.portalserver.* returns 86 results.

I have read most of them and few seem to offer any resolution, there are ALOT of very unhappy people out there.

Unlike most people I am only reaching a very early stage in the portal creation process, most seem to get past the 'extending virtual server' step, but I don't. The app pool identity has the required privileges on the remote SQL server (database creators role) and local admin rights on the IIS server.

22:41:32 Checking virtual server state.
22:41:32 Virtual server needs extend.
22:41:32 Extending virtual server 'http://myserver:8100/' using existing AppPool 'MSSharePointPortalAppPool'...
22:41:33 Failed to create portal successfully MY Portal

UPDATE: Travis advised that I should have removed WSS before starting the SPS installation but this document clearly states that during SPS installation "your virtual servers for WSS are automatically disconnected" it does not at any point indicate that you should first uninstall WSS completely. This is a valid point but not the source of the problems in this case.

UPDATE 2: Having completely removed SPS and WSS and restored our production sites from backups I have had more time now to inspect the server event logs.

It seems that at the stage when I was asked to configure the component assignments web/search/index/ (SPS Central Administration | Configure Server Topology), there are 'Information' messages in the event log (surely these should be warnings or errors?!) relating to errors with various SharePoint-related services (search service, alert service etc)

e.g. "..description for Event ID ( 0 ) in Source ( SharePoint Portal Alert Service ) cannot be found."

So there is no way to find out what the errors are, but in any case it seems a whole slew of services failed to get installed properly. What annoys me no end is that the 'Configure Server Topology' page gives you no indication that anything has gone wrong.

The reason I assume that these services failed to get installed is that immediately preceding these cryptic errors there are more specific errors as follows: 

"The configuration information of the performance library "C:\WINDOWS\system32\infoctrs.dll" for the "InetInfo" service does not match the trusted performance library information stored in the registry" and there was a similar one relating to W3SVC

then one of these:

"WMI ADAP was unable to process the SharePoint Portal Alerts Notification Service performance library since one of the data blobs reported to have classes but had zero size"

and one of these:

"WMI ADAP was unable to retrieve data from the PerfLib subkey: SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SPSARPI\Performance\Library, error code: 0x80041009"

the same error was also logged for SPSAUTOCAT, SPSGATHERER, SPSGTHRSVC, SPSINDEX, SPSMATRIXPI, SPSSEARCH, SSO, subpi.

Then there was this (reported under the identity of the app pool service account being used for SPS/WSS):

"Windows cannot unload your classes registry file - it is still in use by other applications or services. The file will be unloaded when it is no longer in use."

and

"Windows saved user MyDomain\svcSharePoint registry while an application or service was still using the registry during log off. The memory used by the user's registry has not been freed. The registry will be unloaded when it is no longer in use. This is often caused by services running as a user account, try configuring the services to run in either the LocalService or NetworkService account."

and then

"The worker process failed to initialize the http.sys communication or the w3svc communication layer and therefore could not be started. The data field contains the error number."

If anyone know why all this could have occurred I'd be interested to hear. In the meantime I'm probably going to call TechNet direct.

UPDATE 3: We had numerous issues with DNS and Kerberos authentication on our domain about which we raised a PSS call to Microsoft who dealt with the issue very efficiently. After also reinstalling W2K3 from scratch I then didnt have any problems installing SPS, thanks to everyone who replied with comments.