One situation that you may have experienced is the lack of the "Save site as template" link in the Site Settings page of a MOSS 2007 site even if you have administrative privileges on the site or site collection. This will happen if your site is a Publishing site (either a Publishing site, used primarily for public faced Internet web sites or a Collaboration Portal, used primarily for Intranet Portals). You can check if your site is a Publishing site by checking if you have the Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure feature activated if you are at the top level of your site collection or if Office SharePoint Server Publishing feature is activated if you are in a sub site. Microsoft has disabled the "Save site as template" for Publishing sites and it is not supported. If you still want to save your publishing site as a template, you can do it by appending "/_layouts/savetmpl.aspx" to the URL of your site. If the URL of your site is
http://intranetportal/site
you just have to go to
http://intranetportal/site/_layouts/savetmpl.aspx
in order for you to save your site as a template. I have already successfully managed to save collaboration portal sites as templates but it might happen that you encounter some problems if you try to save a publishing site as template since this is not a supported procedure. For more information on this, please check this Microsoft Support article.