I fought with this same issue for hours yesterday and tried everything suggested here to no avail. I finally figured it out this morning. Not sure if this applies to all instances though. In my case, I had brought feature classes from an SDE into ArcMap and was trying to publish to the server. I had renamed the layers to more map-user-friendly names other than the raw file names. This is apparently what was causing the issue. Once I changed the layer names back to match the file names in the SDE, I was able to publish with no problems. Hope this helps somebody else!
... View more