When you try to delete a SharePoint Shared Services Provider – SSP, you may notice the SSP stuck with unprovisioning as its state. Eg. SharedServices1 (Unprovisioning)

Possible Cause: The SSP database has been deleted in SQL and SharePoint is unable to delete the SSP.
Some objects may still be dependent on the configuration database, hence you are unable to delete the SSP.

Solution: Manually delete the SSP by the following stsadm command:
stsadm -o deletessp -title “ssp_name”


You may also want to check if your SSP is providing services to other farms.
1. Go to Central admin > Application Management > Manage Shared Services between Farms
2. Disable “This farm will provide shared services to other farms”
3. Enable “This farm does not participate in shared services between farms”

Try to delete the SSP again.


You may also receive this error:

“An object in the SharePoint administrative framework, “SharedResourceProvider Name=SSP Parent=SPFarm Name=MOSS”, could not be deleted because other objects depend on it. Update all of these dependants to point to null or different objects and retry this operation.

Solution: Identify the GUID of the SSP in SQL and then delete the configuration object by the GUID.

Perform the following steps to get the GUID of the unprovisioning SSP and then delete it:
1. Log into the SQL Management studio and go to the configuration database.

2. Expand the tables and open dbo.object

3. Update the following queryto your database name and run it to receive the GUID

SELECT * FROM [Name of your configuration database].[dbo].[Objects]where name like ‘Name of the Shared Services’

4. Run the following stsadm command

stsadm -o deleteconfigurationobject -id “GUID retrieved from object table in SQL database”

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