Question : E_ACCESSDENIED error when trying to import sites into new site collection with stsadm

Here's the situation.

We have a site located at www.site1.com which is made up of hundreds of site collections.  My team recently took over the SharePoint infrastructure at work, and joined a project in-progress that where the purpose is to migrate many of those site collections into a new web application, located at www.site2.com/Sitecollection1.  

To accomplish this task we've created batch file scripts using the import and export commands with stsadm.exe.  A few months ago we imported/exported a good chunk of sites into the new web app with no problems.  This weekend we were attempting to migrate another group of sites into the same web app, but a new site collection and content database.  The exports of the sites went fine, but when we started attempting the imports every single site through an error similar to this:

Progress: De-Serializing Objects to Database.
FatalError: Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.SPGlobal.HandleUnauthorizedAccessException(UnauthorizedAccessException ex)
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Library.SPRequest.CreateWeb(String bstrUrl, String bstrTitle, String bstrDescription, UInt32 nLCID, String bstrWebTemplate, Boolean bCreateUniqueWeb, Boolean bConvertIfThere, Guid& pgWebId, Guid& pgRootFolderId, Boolean bCreateSystemCatalogs)


We've had our DBA verify that the service account we are logged in and running the imports scripts as does have DBO rights on the content databases.  Just for testing we had him give the service account SA rights, and even then we continued to get the ACCESSDENIED errors.  Also for testing I blew away the site collection, and created a new content DB and site collection and then tried to import in to there.  Same error.  To troubleshoot even further, I ran the same batch script in our pre-prod environment and it imported the sites just fine.  

If anyone can offer some insight I'd really appreciate it.  Thanks!

Answer : E_ACCESSDENIED error when trying to import sites into new site collection with stsadm

Hey guys, I've resolved this problem.  The issue is that in order to disable users from creating new sites, someone from our product team went into central admin--->application management--->user permissions for web application, and cleared the check box for "Create subsites."  So this was causing the imports to fail obviously.  I enabled that box and was then able to successfully import.