No.......it's not. What I neglected to articulate is that I use the ADSI Edit snap-in and edit the service principal name property ( of the service account) directly while on the domain controller. I don't use the command line interface to create or modify the property. You see what I'm saying? Trust me...the SPN is correct. I've been doing this for years.

When I'm done doing what I just said, the SPN is...

MSSQLsvc/sq01:1433

MSSQLsvc/sq01.virt.local:1433

And even if I did have the SPN hosed, it still wouldn't explain why the process doesn't start with some ID's and does with others. In other words, the correctness or incorrectness of the SPN doesn't determine whether or not the process will start or won't start. At least it never has in the years I've been using them. Sure, you'll get errors being thrown in the Event logs, and communications between processes won't work. But it won't effect whether or not the process starts.