Merge Replication Issue

Hello, I have a merge replication problem. I have one publisher/distributor
and roughly about 40 subcribers to a replicated database of about 10 gig
in size. I'm using SQL 2000 and have Sql sp3 on all my machines. I
wanted to do some maintenance on my publsher and so I changed in the
subscriber's job schedule the "Start Date" to be the next day. I don't know
why but this caused the replications between the subscribers and the
publishers to fail. The error message I received stated the following,
"The process could not check the existence of the generation at the 'Publisher'".
This message would appear after a 10 minute delay. So, I decided to
change the "Start Date" back to the original date and just synch one of
my subscriber. It started synching alright, but it seems to be going
through several generations. It has taken the subscriber over six hours
to synch and it has it not finished. I need to know if this is normal
and how can I shorten the process. I thought it would just synch back
with the publishers and upload the 1-day changes and not go through all
the generations.

Thanking you in advance for any assistance with this issueYou probably need to check this and see what settings need to be affected when attempting to suspend merge agents:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/replsql/replmon_9pwh.asp|||First thank you for the reply. The article explained the problem I was going through.

We fortunately found the root of our problem. It was not so much the validations that were happening at the subscriber but an individual subscriber that had a extremely large msgenhistory table that it wanted to compare with the distributor. This particular subscriber was a new subscriber and should not had needed to be trying to validate it's data since it had just received a new snapshot. So, we dumped it's gehist and that helped. After this we started to first start to synch our subscribers and as soon as they started validating the articles, we stopped the synchronization procees. We then immediately started the synch process again and everything was fine. We had to do this for every one of the 40 subscribers.

Hope our experience helps others.