Introduction

Recently we had an issue on a client’s SharePoint farm. The issue only occured on one SharePoint web front end and the following message was displayed within the server’s event log:-

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: Office SharePoint Server
Event Category: Office Server Shared Services
Event ID: 5783
Date:  dd/mm/yyyy
Time:  hh:mm:ss
User:  N/A
Computer: XXXXXX
Description:
Synchronization for Shared Services Provider ‘xxxx’ has failed. The operation will be retried.

Reason: Collection was modified; enumeration operation may not execute.

Technical Support Details:
System.InvalidOperationException: Collection was modified; enumeration operation may not execute.
   at System.Collections.Hashtable.HashtableEnumerator.MoveNext()
   at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.SharedResourceProvider.SynchronizeConfigurationDatabaseAccess(SharedComponentSecurity security)
   at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.SharedResourceProvider.SynchronizeAccessControl(SharedComponentSecurity sharedApplicationSecurity)
   at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.SharedResourceProvider.Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.ISharedComponent.Synchronize()
   at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.SharedResourceProviderJob.Execute(Guid targetInstanceId)

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Solutions

There were a number of solutions around including this thread, http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sharepointadmin/thread/d2d0e939-2e29-462e-a2f0-6f5e54f6e8fd

The thread talks about running the following commands:-

stsadm -o sync

This will force Sync on all Databases. Wait for some time may be an hour before running following commands.

stsadm -o sync -ListOldDatabases <Days>

This command will list out the databases which are out of sync for number of days specified.
You can also runfollowing command

stsadm -o sync -DeleteOldDatabases <days>

This will Remove Databases which it is unable to sync for number of days specified

stsadm -o sync

However when the command: stsadm -o sync -ListOldDatabases 1 was run then the following message was returned:

“No Databases met the criteria specified”.

Fix

The fix was to restart the Windows SharePoint Timer Job using:-

• net stop sptimerv3
• net start sptimerv3

No further error messages were received in the event log.