"User cannot be found" while provisioning SSP

Breaking my head over this error, I tried all possible options for this including entering the service account password again for all application pools and resetting IIS countless number of times. Finally, ran into a blog post which asked to check the site collection admin on the central admin site and the SSP admin site. Apparently, the service account must be the site collection admin for the admin sites (central admin and default SSP admin if already created).