In 7/2000 there was a concept of "alternate sync partner" which was intended to handle disaster situations, but could work here as well.  Bascially your local publishers would republish the...

This could be the result of a service pack mismatch between publisher and subscriber.  Either way, re-applying the service pack with recreate the merge replication objects with their proper definition.

This could be the result of a service pack mismatch between publisher and subscriber.  Either way, re-applying the service pack with recreate the merge replication objects with their proper definition.

Permissions should also be assigned directly to a Domain Local account.  I think I recall an issue where SQL having trouble properly authenticating Global groups under some conditions.

The best practice...

Using two consecutive single-quotes should always work, where using double-quote to identify a string will be sensitive to the QUOTED_IDENTIFER setting, which I suspect you set to OFF.  I'd recommened...

Your time may be better spent pushing for a move to SQL 2005.  DDL Triggers are designed exactly for this purpose and make it very easy to log by querying...

Outstanding rant.  In addition to providing some LOL entertainment, this is a great source of interview weed-out questions.

Well done!

You can use the sp_removedbreplication stored proc to remove all replication objects, including those used for your current publication.  This is only an option is you are willling to create...

This is a hack and wouldn't be supported by MS, but you could create a merge publication and then remove the update and delete triggers that replication creates on each...

This is a great article on merge replication.  If you do go with merge, get familiar with the metadata tables used by merge replication.  Check out the topic "replication, performance"...

If having a read-only database serves your needs, you could implement a poor-man's log shipping by restoring transaction logs to the server using the STANDBY clause on the development server. ...

1- When using merge replication, a column with the property ROWGUIDCOL, along with a unique index is added to each published table.  This can serve as your primary key on the...

I suspect the connection breaks and the continous agent is sitting there in a failed state waiting for a manual stop/start to reconnect it to the subscriber.  After a server...

Somehow, two different subscribers must have inserted the same GUID in the column defined as ROWGUIDCOL on the same table.  I'd say this is worth opening a support case to...

One option is to create the database on your subscriber yourself with the tables/indexes spread across filegroups as you wish.  Then create your publication with options that state the subscriber...