Help Content Cannot Be Displayed in SharePoint 2010

Today we had a weird error on our SharePoint 2010 production farm: clicking on help got the "help content cannot be displayed" error for all normal sites, even though it worked perfectly well in Central Admin. The same applied to Site Settings>Help Settings for the site-collection, it worked in Central Admin, but not in any other site. In addition, the 'SharePoint Foundation Search' service was running on one WFE server.

First I checked all settings in KB939313 without that fixing the problem, then I checked the log files and found this access denied error for our site's app-pool account:

SqlError: 'The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object 'proc_EnumResourcesAtScope', database 'SharePoint_AdminContent_ABBAef34-7603-4da5-823a-43ee1327ABBA', schema 'dbo'.'

Before embarking on changing any database rights, we decided to test with an English site just in case, as all our custom site definitions are in Norwegian. Lo and behold - help worked for the new team-site; and what's more, suddenly help was working for all our existing Norwegian LCID 1044 sites also. Go figure...

[UPDATE] See the comments for tips on granting execute rights on the sprocs listed in the ULS to fix this problem once and for all - even beyond IISRESET.

Starting Term Store Management in SharePoint 2010

If you can't get any edit or management popup menus such as add term store term group to show in the SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata Service application Term Store Management Tool, check that:

• Internet Explorer is started with "Run as administrator"
• You have added your taxonomy managers to the "Term Store Administrators" for the MMS root node

This is required even if you are an administrator of the MMS application itself and you have full control MMS connection permissions.

So then you're ready to realize your ingenious taxonomy for classifying and organizing your knowledge with managed metadata and content types.