Cannot activate Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure in Site Settings

I recently came across an issue with activating the Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure through the Site Settings of a clients site.
When I clicked "Activate" it returned an access denied error, even with the Farm account. After trying a few things I tried the old STSADM standby and sure enough there is an "Activate Feature" command.
The syntax looks like this:
stsadm.exe -o activatefeature -name PublishingResources -url http://sitename

This should activate the feature, you may have to go back into the Site Settings and activate but this did the trick in our case.