Thanks, Scott, that's excellent information!  I don't have a place to reproduce the problem now but I suspect that it was as you and Mike suggested.  I've since installed MS-03-031.

I didn't think that was the case for this instance, but I did restart the instance yesterday and now I can see the performance counters.  So it must have been...

Yalena--I strongly agree with your recommendations, if individual users (rather than a program) are to be granted db permissions.  Unfortunately I've seen too many 3rd-party apps that aren't set up...

We did not have to set up a special job to call sp_mergemetadataretentioncleanup; it ran automatically.  However, our merge agents are configured to stop and restart frequently.  I think it's...

If this app is on an intranet and any of your users can get a client connection tool (like Query Analyzer or the free Toad for SQL Server), they can...

My team has experienced something similar, except that once a backup job started failing it continued to fail repeatedly. 

We found that after repointing the device to a filename in UNC...

Setup a test merge publication, using a Microsoft-supplied profile, being sure that the subscriber and publisher are at sp1 or higher.  Put a trace on the server using Profiler.  Watch...

Search in Books Online for "Merge Meta Data Cleanup".  This will give you some decent background on the different options that are available.  I've been involved in the past in...

Tinker--it's been too long since I did it to remember the exact options to select when going through the wizard, but you can elect to apply the snapshot with no...

In terms of being provoking (which is helpful to get someone to read it), this is well written. But I disagree with the main point that SQL logins are...