I ran into an issue where I needed to recreate a Shared Service Provider for a SharePoint environment. The original admin setup the SSP admin site inside of an existing Web Application/Site Collection. Besides manageability, this kind of configuration can cause problems with the search provider and mysites.

There are a lot of blogs and instructions which tell you how to create SSP's and move applications between them. You can use this post by Tony Zink: http://www.pptspaces.com/sharepointreporterblog/Lists/Posts/ViewPost.aspx?ID=18 to create the new SSP. The problem I ran into was deleting the original SSP because it was the Parent SSP. A Parent SSP is the SSP which provides shared services to a sharepoint farm. It is identified by the word Parent in parenthesis directly after the SSP's name. You cannot delete an SSP designated as the Parent without first removing it from the Parent SSP role by doing the following:

1. Open Central Administration
2. Click on the Application Management tab
3. Click "Grant or configure shared services between farms" under Office SharePoint Server Shared Services
4. Select your new SSP and click OK

After doing this, you should be able to delete the ssp. If you can't delete the SSP through Central Admin, use this command from the 12 hive (c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web service extensions\12\bin):
stsadm -o deletessp -title SharedServices