Recently I encountered a pretty weird situation where mysite creation was stuck on “We’re almost ready”. This can be caused by many things but for this special case it was related to “user lookup”.

Naturally you will check that everything is in order:

– User profile service is running | OK
– Profile sync is running | OK
– Permissions to create mysite | OK
– AD permissions | OK
– User exist in AD and is not disabled | OK

Then you dive into the ULS logs with “verbose” logging on, if you find the error below in the logs, then this means that there is something wrong with the “People Picker” of  Your Mysite Webapplication

Error in resolving user ‘DOMAIN\user’ : System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryServicesCOMException (0x8007202B): A referral was returned from the server.

at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.Bind(Boolean throwIfFail)

at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.Bind()

at System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry.get_AdsObject()

at System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher.FindAll(Boolean findMoreThanOne)

at Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.PeopleEditor.SearchFromGC(SPActiveDirectoryDomain domain, String strFilter, String[] rgstrProp, Int32 nTimeout, Int32 nSizeLimit, SPUserCollection spUsers, ArrayList& rgResults)

at Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.SPUserUtility.ResolveAgainstAD(String input, Boolean inputIsEmailOnly, Boolean useUpnInResolve, SPActiveDirectoryDomain globalCatalog, SPPrincipalType scopes, SPUserCollection usersContainer, TimeSpan searchTimeout, String customFilter)

at Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.SPActiveDirectoryPrincipalResolver.ResolvePrincipal(String input, Boolean inputIsEmailOnly, SPPrincipalType scopes, SPPrincipalSource sources, SPUserCollection usersContainer)

at Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.SPUtility.ResolveWindowsPrincipal(SPWeb web, SPWebApplication webApp, String input, SPPrincipalType scopes, Boolean inputIsEmailOnly, Boolean includeUpnInOperations).

The solution:

Check that Your mysite webapplication’s “UserAccountDirectoryPath” can lookup Your users:

$mysite = Get-SPSite “http://mysite.company.com”
$mysite.UserAccountDirectoryPath

If the values you are getting back is not looking the way it should be, reset the hole thing:

Set-SPSite -Identity “http://mysite.company.com -UserAccountDirectoryPath “”

I hope that this might help others with similar issues.

Cheers