access denied in sharepoint 2007

I found a couple of strange problems sharepoint 2007.

1. When you are trying to run a profile import against a domain, even if you set credentials explicitly, it will not work unless you log in with an account that has domain access. (This makes no sense..)
2. Even though you are a site administrator, collection administrator, everything, when you click on “user profiles and properties” under your shared services ssp, you get an “access denied”. I found this fix that someone else posted.