If you have a remote distributor setup it must also be set as a publisher.  Not having this set will produce error 20036.

The Workaround:
To get around the problem, you will have to mark the distribution server as a publisher as well. But you don't have to publish any articles from the distribution server's databases.

To mark the distributor as a publisher, follow these steps in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS):

   - Connect to the replication distribution server
   - Right click on the "Replication" node in the server tree
   - Select "Distributor Properties..." from the popup menu
   - Click on the "Publishers" page in the left hand side pane
   - Tick the check box against the name of the distribution server
   - Click "OK", and provide any other requested information

The same can be performed from the query window of SSMS, using a system stored procedure called, sp_adddistpublisher. For more information about the parameters required by this procedure, see SQL Server 2005 Books Online.