You can add a layer (pop up a login window) in your VB code to prompt your users to input their logins and passwords. How does it work?

Did you check whether or not the related ports are opened on this server or the firewall in between?

How much memory is there in your server? Did you have any chance to read the articles in the following links?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189103.aspx

http://bytes.com/forum/thread80203.html

Did you check whether or not there were any other jobs running against your server at the same time?

Does your new instance is on a shared server? If so, your test during peak time will affect other applications.

Identical data is not enough to do a test. You...

When running the scripts,

SELECT * FROM master..sysprocesses

EXEC sp_who2 active

pay attention to the IO and CPU time. If they do not change, your job is most likely hanging there.

Is there any other process running on this server beside yours? If yes, run sp_lock to see whether or not there is any object lock. If no, then, it most...

You may try the following two scripts to see what are running on your server.

SELECT * FROM master..sysprocesses

EXEC sp_who2 active

If your server use SAN storage, you may not do the defrag. The defrag may cause issues on other servers.

Did you try the system table, sys.sysindexes?

Not completely understand your question. But here are my thought.

If you data souce is correctly defined, you should not use [1.1.1.2] because your OPENDATABASE clause has already been defined as...

Check the following syntaxes, please.

GRANT READ ...

GRANT EXE ...

How about something like,

GRANT EXEC ON yourProc TO PUBLIC

Did you check the Properties in the Table View mode?

I would be doubt that you are able to restore the database before dropping your replication. As the result, I think you need to

1. Script out your replication first;

2....