SN.exe "Access is Denied" when attempting to generate a keypair

[pmarshall1971]

Currently on my Windows 2000 server, where we do our builds, whenever we to
generate a key to be able to strong name our assemblies we receive the
follwing error.

Failed to generate a strong name key pair -- Access is denied.

This has occured once before, and the only way to fix the problem was to
re-install the operating system !.

I have tried running sn -c to reset the cryptography service provider, with
no effect.

There doesn't appear to be any other information about SN.exe failing..

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Peter Marshall