Yeah I was thinking about taking the parameter and assigning it to a local variable, but before even going there ... why does this behavior exist as an adhoc statement?...

Hey Grant, thanks for the reply.

The code above, is all I'm running. It's taken from the sproc; however, just as an adhoc T-SQL. I can recreate the behavior meaning, hard...

Yeah, a BACPAC (which was painfully slow to backup/restore).

Updated stats on both sides. As soon as I did the DBCC STACKDUMP, it worked just fine. Something doesn't add up.

Being that...

Apologies for the delayed follow up, been a bit of a fire fighting exercise as of late.

When I say the same, I mean 100% the same. I pulled down a...

Well, after waiting it out and coming back ... it's all working. So moral of the story, the service account needs delegation permissions.

Thanks all!

OK ... back at this. Started clean.
- Validated service account has proper SPN permissions
- Removed existing SPN's
- Waited 15 minutes for replication, validated gone
- Granted Keberos...

That's fun. Just tried a repair and blew up with: "SQL Server Setup has encountered the following error:C:\Windows\Installer\d04dd640.msi.".

Reviewing this article now: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/969052/how-to-restore-the-missing-windows-installer-cache-files-and-resolve-problems-that-occur-during-a-sql-server-update

Interesting. Well, so far ... I'm working like a champ with only having the delegation on the machines. I'll give it until tomorrow before I commit to this decision to...

So current test ... the service account does not have delegation permissions but both computers do, and I appear to be working just fine.

There's no way to auto-set...

Again, not something I've had to do in the past (3 different environments), but I just enabled delegation in AD on the machine name, and now it's working? Why wouldn't...

This whole trust for delegation thing is the only thing standing out. Perhaps I've overlooked in the past; however, I don't ever remember having to modify this. Actually just checked...

OK, finally got it. Even though it's a job step of PowerShell, the combo I finally got to work was "powershell.exe -NoProfile -File "X:\File.ps1"

All set