When i started installing MOSS across our three server farm everything initially appeared to have gone well and i was ready to start creating the SSPs & web apps when Central Administration completely disappeared.
The issue:
SQL server was running both SQL 2000 as well as SQL 2005 and for some reason all the DBs had been created in SQL 2000.
I can't find a reason why this happened - all the previous installations had used the same SQL Server and had by default created the DBs on SQL 2005.
To fix it:
Use a SQL Server with only SQL 2005 installed on it!
