Merge Replication Problems

I am having a heck of a time trying to get merge replication to work. I have two tables that consistently fail validation - even just rowcount after applying a snapshot that I created seconds before and at a time when there is no activity on the tables.

Is there a guide/info somewhere about how to troulbeshoot this? The tables are fairly straightforward (but 35,000 rows) and there are no filters set up. The remote database is connected over the internet and I was hoping to be able to get the two databases to synch continuously.

Also, when I create the merge agent, the wizard doesn't show the schedule option (i.e. whether to run continuously or on a schedule) and therefore I have to set the -continuous option on the merge agent manually.

I have been struggling with this for 2 weeks so any help/pointers would be most appreciated.

After more playing around, it appears that if I create a merge publication to a database that already has a continuous transactional subscription, I don't get the option to set the merge subscription to update the merge subscription continuously. I've now put all my tables into one big merge publication.... hopefully that will work.

Am I on the right track: in sql2000 is there some limitation that doesn't allow a continuous merge and a continuous transactional publication/subscription to and from the same publisher/subscriber database pair?

thanks....

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I don't know if this is the answer to my own question but: it appears that trying to get continuous merge and continuous transactional replication to coexist from the same publisher database to the same subscription database was my problem.

I have no idea why, nor whether this is documented somewhere, but now I have made all of my publications continuous merge (even though transactional would seem to be the reight choice for most of the tables) gets over all the problems I was having with the merge publications continually failing.

Can anyone confirm this? Or did I unknowingly stumble upon some other fix while reconfiguring all replication from scratch?

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if you want to do validation, you need to do it when activity on the subscriber and publisher are minimal, otherwise if changes are continuously happening on one end while validation is occuring, there's a chance you'll never be in sync.

If you stop the transactional replication, and stop all other changes, I bet your validation will pass.