SharePoint 2010: View Audience Membership in Central Admin “Failed to render the result list.”

Question

I'm using audience targeting for links in SharePoint 2010. I use a combination of AD groups, SharePoint groups and Audiences to target links on various sites. Some new members were added to one of my AD groups, but the links targeted to that group didn't appear for them. I decided to create an Audience in Central Admin to see if that worked. The audience compiles with no errors, shows a reasonable number of members, but when I try to view the membership of the audience, I get the error "Failed to render the result list."

None of my audiences are working for new members, including ones using SharePoint groups. Oddly, audiences are working for older members of several groups...it's only newly added members or new groups that are failing.

I stopped and restarted the User Profile Synch service, but that didn't help.

Answer 1

SOLVED! This user Profile Service was not one of the default Service Connections, so my Central Administration web application had no connection to it. As soon as I connected the Central Admin web application to this User Profile Service Application, audiences started showing up properly.