Having had a very similar problem, along with many other associated problems, which put my work at an altogether unacceptable, extended standstill, I decided to post the resolution I found to as many forums relating to this issue that I could.
The resolution that I found was one of two things that I did at the same time. (duh – not a smart tactic, but I was getting desperate…) I am not willing to spend the time to isolate the effects of each of these motions, so it could be one, or the other, or both.
- I noticed that SharePoint was moving the Farm Account Security Managed Account (The user account that Farm Account uses for credentials) from the Administrators group, to the WSS_ADMIN_WPG group. In my case Central Admin was being run on the same machine as the SharePoint Server. I run a single server developer environment. So the Farm Account needed “Log on Locally” privileges. WSS_ADMIN_WPG group did not appear to have the needed privilege, where the Administrators group did. Strangely enough though, the Administrators group is a member of the WSS_ADMIN_WPG group. So I moved the above mentioned user account back into the Administrators group.
Let me know if I’m not seeing something here.
- Upon examining the SecurityTokenServiceApplicationPool (the name I gave for the Security Token Service’s Application Pool), I notice that the Enable 32-bit Applications setting under the Advanced Settings had been set to True. This to me was strange as I remembered installing the 64 bit versions of everything, because the Server machine on which I was working was indeed 64 bit. So I set it to False.
After those two simple motions I did all the familiar and necessary things to be done to make sure that the system and SharePoint was running with all the latest settings and tried what I had been doing once again, and to my amazement and shock (after having tried everything on the internet several times each) it worked! I am now happily moving forward in my work! At least until the next roadblock comes along.
Weird, dumb and stupid, what were the chances? Maybe it will be worth a quick look for you.