The many reasons for "Data Is Invalid" in MOSS 2007

Well .. this is something I have been grappling with for about 2 weeks ... one of our test farms started spewing out this error and for the life of me I couldn't work out why.

We were getting it in the following scenarios:

1. Creating a new Web Application
2. Installing SharePoint, and running the Products & Technologies Wizard
3. Adding a new web front end server to an existing Farm

(Note - 2 - the error was when provisioning the Central Admin web application, so similar to point 1)

Now, "Data Invalid" surely points to SQL Server, and to a certain extent that was correct, but not as you might have thought!

It seems that we were getting this error while logging in using an account which does not have both local admin rights and appropriate SQL server permissions!

You would have thought that having Farm Administrator permissions would be enough to create a new web application or add a new web front end, but it appears that the SQL Server permissions break down and it doesn’t work!