In this situation, I ended up getting the error message: Failed to provision the SharePoint Central Administration Web Application

 

My setup is a Windows Server 2008 Enteprise x64 box with SQL Server 2008 – attempting to configure my recently installed SharePoint 2007.  That should have done the trick but I ended up getting the above error message anyways.  After some additional research, it became apparent that my IIS 7.0 installation was incorrect.  And once I fixed that, I was good to go.

 

So thanks to Jonas Nilsson on the linked thread below for identifying that IIS was the potential culprit.

 

And for the docuemnt that contains the listing of which IIS 7.0 modules you need, please reference this link:

 

Hope this helps!