Your post came just as I was initializing a replication subscription that has mysteriously been marked inactive and needed to be reinitialized. My company uses replication from servers in remote locations with limited connectivity so when it breaks it is a long process to get is working again. Fortunately this is not a frequent occurrence and the product works as advertised with just a few 'mysterious' events. I have not found a better product for data exporting with a usable user interface that I can get setup within an hour of getting the request. CDC is rather more complicated that I need as is Service Broker which I have used for other projects. I'll continue to use Replication and hope for less 'brittleness' in future upgrades.