One of those really annoying messages which gives little or no hint as to what user is having the issue.  I saw this when using ULS Viewer to check for other issues I was having with a SharePoint farm.

IOWSTIMER.EXE (0x09A8) 0x0C20 SharePoint Foundation Database 5586 Critical
Unknown SQL Exception 297 occurred. Additional error information from SQL Server
is included below. The user does not have permission to perform this
action.

What the heck was this about?  Why was I only seeing it on one of the Web Front End Servers not all of them? how to solve it?

Well I can’t necessarily answer the second point, but it was due to the Service Account which ran the Timer Service not having sufficient permission on the SQL Server that was hosting the website Content Database.  I found the  answer in this rather obscure Technet Forum thread .  Basically you need to run the following bit of SQL code:

GRANT VIEW SERVER STATE TO [your timer account]

You will find this does in fact solve the issue. Bizarre…

Cheers

Dave Mc