On the other hand, it doesn't seem to be too obvious an optimization for SERVICE to check whether the target userid is valid in the CP directory, test whether the minidisk is valid, and not choke horribly if one or the other isn't true. Given the complexity of SES/E, this seems like something the tools could be smarter about, given the 97 billion weird edge cases they already look for...8-)
Well - to be fair to SERVICE - I did tell it to SERVICE ALL. So I got what was coming to me for being lazy.