Yeah…not a good question ask yourself.  But I found myself in this situation today.  It appeared that I had run the updatefarmcredentials on one of the SP servers, but not the other…oops. :)  What I saw was a second SharePoint server that had no IIS apps on it for the new web apps I created for the SSP.  Therefore the SSP creation was failing too.  I look on my other server, and lo and behold, there are no other sites on it beside default and office web services. The timer jobs indicated that they had failed in Central Admin –> Operations –> Timer Job status.  So I deleted them. Now for the resolution!

I went to my second server and ran the updatefarmcredentials there.  So we had goodness in the world, but still no joy on the sites.  I thought to myself, “self what have you done?!?!”  So I thought about it, and then I thought, “what if I try this…”  Usually disastrous, true, but it worked for me.  What I did was go to services on server (Central Admin –> Operations) and dropped the box down on the offending server.  At the bottom you see this:

So I just clicked “Stop” on the SharePoint Services Web Application.  After stopping, I restarted and voila! the web apps appeared on the server!  Happy day!

I hope this may be helpful to someone out there!