Recently while editing the preferred search center for MySites, there was a message that the user profile service was not accessible and attempts to save the setting, did not succeed. No fail message was recieved, the screen just closed.
Turns out the account being used for default content access account in the search application did not have db owner and search admin on the four main search databases, SearchDB, SearchDB_crawlStore, SearchDB_LinkStore, and SearchDB_AnalyticsReporting
after that was changed via sql server management studio (ssms) all was right with the world, again.
