Force Deletion of an SSP

There is a lot of pain involved with removing an SSP thats having errors due to the database no longer existing.  Of course trying to remove the database via Central Administration and even STSADM, I got alot of errors such as "Cannot open database." and "Failed to delete SSP".

Fortunately there is an undocumented switch for the "STSADM -o DeleteSSP" command that will help in this situation. 

"Stsadm -o deletessp -title SSPNAME -force".

 The -force will delete the entry even if there are errors occuring. 

There are less aggressive methods, such as using stsadm -o deleteconfigurationobject, but if you are trying to connect to a non-existant database, that one probably wont work.  To do this one, query the objects table in the config database for your server, looking for the SSP name in the "name" column, Then take the ID of that object and use it against the stsadm -o deleteconfigurationobject command.