Solved! Go to Solution.
I received this error using ArcGIS for Server 10.2 when I tried to publish from an mxd in my C:/Users/user/Desktop folder. Once I moved the mxd and data to a folder higher in the directory structure (to C:/newFolder), I no longer had the error. I assume this was a permissions issue; this does seem to be (another) one of those ESRI errors which the error description itself is not really related to the actual problem.
@ESRI - there's a lot of us getting this error message including myself. Can you shed some light on the possible causes of this issue?
Brad