Have you ever received the error message:
There has been an error creating the personal site. Contact your site administrator for more information.
when you open up My Site for the first time? I have heard about this before and also read the solution (for instance found here). This is usually related to permissions not set up the right way but the other day I found out that it can happen during other circumstances. It’s likely that you will not get it but I thought that it would be good to share the knowledge.
The strange thing this time was that it only happened to one user and not everyone. That indicates that it’s not a permission problem, or most likely not.
I looked in the SSP and the user was imported in the profile import and the info from the AD was there. I decided to delete the site collection and found out that there was already another My Site Site collection there but with another name. It turns out that a former employee had the same AD account name. The account had been deleted from the AD since it was a long time ago but the My Site was still there. So SharePoint were not able to create the My Site because it already had Site Collection with that name.
Lesson learned. An updated routine for when deleting AD accounts on former employees. Best practise would be to never delete AD accounts in terms of traceability but it might also be a good thing to have a policy for how long My Sites should be stored. A suggestion is to have a retention period for when you delete the content and then have a Custom Property connected to AD where you manage the employment status like “full time”, “contractor”, “Parental leave” and Left the company yy-mm-dd etc.
