This is an issue that I came across the other day and really had be stumped for a long time, my issue was a little different to what I had found others have had. If you speak to a SharePoint engineer they will tell you this is a common issue however with mine the service was working fine before. Because of this I had to disregard all the usual troubleshooting such as checking permissions. This was also a relatively new machine so SharePoint was still being configured. After hours of troubleshooting I actually found the issue was a simple issue of the FIM service on the machine not being started. Unfortunately when trying to start the service it then said it couldn’t be started due to timing out. Luckily the fix for this is simple and you will need to do the following:
***I highly advise you take a registry key backup before making any changes***
- Go onto Regedit on the machine
- Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control
- On this right click and select ‘New DWord (32bit) value’
- You will need to name this ‘ServicesPipeTimeout’ and assign it a decimal value.
- The decimal value can be anything however this is done in miliseconds therefore the most common value is 60000 (converts to 60 seconds).
- Click okay then reboot your machine.
Hope this helps!
