For the benefit of any future unwary victims.

The Audit_DDL_Events table is one that is used by DDL triggers for tracking changes, and presumably is only set up when you create a DLL trigger - rather than out of the box. SO, when you merely copy over a database with one in, the table's not created in master. Then when you run replication setup, this fires the DDL trigger, which has nowhere to log the event, and went pecs up as a result.

So, in this case, either disable the DDL trigger or recreate it (presumably - not actually checked it as I just disabled it).

There's a chunk of my life I'm not getting back :crazy: