I'm thinking permissions are beyond stuffed at this point...

I tried Foxxcos' idea, and there are NO errors / warnings / critical events logged in the WMI log when I try to change one of the service accounts. Lots of other stuff gets logged, but I've not yet taken the time to try to plow through and see if I can find my attempt at changing the service account.

As of now, last night we tried loading an OS update MS support suggested, as well as (the expected long shot) running chkdsk /f on the drives. Unfortunately, we're still in the same boat.

Also come to find out, this problem has managed to also break Full Text Indexing on the one DB using it, and Filestream on the DB using that...

Getting psyched up to start a "crash" migration to a new server, although I'd really rather avoid that right now (in the midst of a migration already from a Server 2003 / SQL 2005 Cluster to a new Server 2008 R2 / SQL 2008 R2)

Thanks,

Jason