I ran into an issue with my SharePoint Central Administration website recently. This was in a my development Virtual PC, using IE7.
I would open the SCAW which appeared to be fine, but some of the functionality wasn’t working. I’d click on certain buttons and nothing would happen. I then noticed that IE was reporting javascript errors.
I tried using FireFox. Some of the errors that I saw in IE weren’t in FireFox, but some of SCAW (usually popups) didn’t work.
Rather try to figure out what I did (I’m assuming that I did something that caused this), I decided to remove the Central Admin site and reinstall it. SO, I used the wizard to remove and then used the wizard to install a fresh SCAW site, which worked fine.