Error when deploying a solution

Today I was trying to install one of the "fantastic 40" templates and when I tried deploying the wsp file, the job started running and resulted in an "error" state. There was nothing in the Event Logs and nothing in the ULS logs either. After some reading on the MS forum, I saw a post where someone suggested (for a similar problem) that the Windows SharePoint Services Administration service had to be running. So I restarted this service on all servers and tried to deploy again... and it worked! I don't know if this will apply in all situations where you just get an error when deploying a solution (most likely not), but it's something you can give a try...