>Hello,
>
>I've had a merge replication setup which was working fine for several months and then all of the sudden the changes at the publisher are not getting to the subscriber, but the subscriber's changes are getting to the publisher. This, of course, started to day after I left for vacation. I guess I'm in luck, since I can just create a new snapshot and reinitialize, but I'd like to figure out what's happening so I can prevent this in ther future.
>
>When I attempt to run sp_publication_validation, I get the message "The publication does not exist". I get nothing when I attempt validation through EM. The publication is listed in the publications table in the distribution database.
>
>I'm not seeing any errors anywhere and the merge agent is running along happily (ignorence is bliss, I suppose). The only error I see is that around the time this problem appeares to have started the transaction log on the published database got full, but this was corrected, it's happend before without effecting replication and the transaction log is not on the same drive as any of the publication database files.
>
>Anyone have any suggestions on where I should look? What might have happened? What I need to do to fix it? At this point I'm just planning on re-creating the publication, but since I can only really do that over the weekend, I want to make sure that'll take care of it.
>
>TIA for any suggestions.

As you are now finding out, replication in SQL server leaves a bit to be desired when it comes to reliability. We ran into far too many oddities and anomolies to even consider using it on our systems. We had problems getting it to work reliably between servers in the same rack, we never even got to really try it over our WAN. We just couldn't trust it, and taking new snapshots to re-start it when it "quit" just wasn't an option as our snapshots took several hours to complete.