Problem upgrading MOSS to the December cumulative updates

I installed the December cumulative update today and the configuration wizard failed with “The B2B upgrader timer job failed.” in the diagnostics log file.

Tried loads of things, including running the configuration routine from the command line using psconfig and also stopping the upgrade job and restarting using stsadm -o setproperty -pn command-line-upgrade-running -pv No (this worked for me in the past when the configuration job failed).

In the end, it was a comment at the bottom of the following page that solved the issue: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointadmin/thread/e3a38087-944b-46aa-b6fa-37482144545b/#page:2

It suggests to remove the WSS Help service from Operations in Central Administration before running the configuration wizard. I decided to ignore the bit about not needing to run psconfig because it tends to log better results during a problem, so ran the following command after stopping the Help service: psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -force

I then ran the normal config wizard to make sure and restarted the WSS Help service in Central Admin....