I have a content deployment job that was running successfully every half an hour
used. I disabled it to run an export/import via stsadm and after that the
central admin job is stuck in preparing forever

There are not errors report on the event log or 12\logs..

Things I've done already with no luck
1. Recreate the deployment path and jobs
2. Double check that the server configured as export server for the source farm
in central admin host an instance of the central admin.
3. Stopped and start the "Windows SharePoint Services Timer"

I found a hotfix but doesn't seem to address this particular scenario and since
I can't reproduce the error in other server I can't test it.