sharepoint BDEADEE2-C265-11D0-BCED-00A0C90AB50F failed due to the following error: 800703fa

A Sharepoint error this morning which when searching the net revealed some obscure reasons for its occurrence.

The full message was more like this:

Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {BDEADEE2-C265-11D0-BCED-00A0C90AB50F} failed due to the following error: 800703fa.

The issue was a change of service account password in Active Directory following an enforced password change. We had gone through and modified the password for the service account on the MOSS server and then restarted it all and oops!.

Changed the password back and restarted and its all ok again.

Lesson: Always management SharePoint passwords from SharePoint.