Your logic sounds good to me.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms176029(SQL.90).aspx

Ha ha! I pretty much just posted the full extent of my knowledge on this subject!

We've never designed-in row-versioning anywhere I've worked. But recently we had...

If you have snapshot row-versioning in any of your user DBs, this very fact will prevent you from shrinking tempdb. I had to shrink such a tempdb this week,...

You're getting "Skipping log backup file since load delay period has not expired" in the history, but load delay is set to zero?

What happens when you make this an active/passive cluster (by offlining one of the SQL groups)? Same behavior? Or maybe you don't have a non-prod environment in which...

sp2 + cumulative rollup #9, sp3 pending

I can't answer, I inherited this. Might be overkill on some of the sp1+ settings? Getting anyone to comment on this was semi-ulterior motive of mine. This...

Maybe the user was granted execute rights in the default instance's msdb, just not obvious to you that this was done? Could have gotten this via role membership, OS...

I've been using the attached MSDTC security settings. Do yours vary significantly?

Very interesting!

I don't have an active/active to check right now. But a have a couple active/passive clusters, and have never needed to ensure SQL and MSDTC were physically running...

as long as you have remote servers or linked servers setup for RPC, this should work:

exec servername.dbname.dbo.executesql 'alter table ...'

or use sp_sqlexec, or whatever variant of...

It looks to me that you have load delay setup, so you transaction log cannot be restored until that delay has elapsed.

If you don't want that delay, remove...

You can see name & status if you change from list view to details view (little icons above the big word "Jobs" in the heading). But that's about...

Thanks for the link, Tim...that's a great article! It confirms some my suspicions (e.g. that progress is not lost when we abort a long-running shrinkfile). If nothing else,...