Like I said, it would be nice to look at the actual connection strings each is using, but the local "system" account is really sort of a non-entity and should...

I can't explain why you are getting that specific error message (I'd like to see your connection string), but you should always have a service run under a domain account...

make sure you add 'sa' as a user in the database in question. You could also try EXECUTE AS OWNER

its not needed there, but it is valid syntax.

char data type is padded with spaces so a char value of 1 space is equal to another with 2 or more spaces.

this may sound ignorant, but have you installed MS Messaging components? There are not installed generally in a default installation. You would get that error if this was the case.

perhaps the test database had "auto shrink" on... or maybe the recovery mode was set to simple (which sort of "auto shrinks" the log).

If you need to recover the space...

If the database is empty just script it out and all the objects/users and permissions and run the scripts in production.

If the DB contains data the easiest way is to...

2.5 million per day, that's 30 per second... spread evenly. More likely you have bursts of perhaps many more times that.

There is an upper limit in terms of TPS and...

you may have to. You haven't stated the transactional rate of your system and the average size of the transactions.

is this a pull subscription?

It is my experience that SQLNCLI has better error handling and reporting than either ODBC or OLEDB. Therefor I would recommend using it if you have the choice. If you...

using the latest service pak?

I don't know for sure but it may be because of the ID - typeName lookup from another table. It seems to me that those values would never be something...

There are many facets to Service broker that you have to consider. It guarantees delivery of messages, but it will disable message queues if you have an activated procedure that...