A lesson learned when provisioning the search service application. I deleted the default one created using the config wizard and created a new one to run under its own application Pools. After which i received this error when trying to manage the application:
The search service is not able to connect to the machine that hosts the administration component. Verify that the administration component ‘bae8d161-c132-4570-aa0d-57baf6cf45h6’ in search application ‘Search Service Application 1’ is in a good state and try again.”
I was unable to start any crawls as a result or view content sources.
The search services were all started correctly but in the Application Services window it showed “Error”.
I fixed it by changing the properties of the application so both Search Admin web service and Search Query and site settings would run under the SharePoint Web Services Default App Pool. After an IIs reset my Search Service Application worked fine.
Hope it helps someone.
Captain Of Sharepoint 
See my later post for a long term resolution for this
This didnt help using Windows Server 2012. Apparently it is referencing a invalid component id for the Admin Component. Not able to fix this currently, it is in the hands of Microsoft atm.