I had to setup replication today over a relatively slow link. It was all going ok and I was viewing progress with the replication monitor and I kept getting errors about the replication not being able to contact the subscriber in the last 10 minutes.

I have read posts about being to use the sp_changedistributor_property stored procedure to change the heartbeat_interval but when I ran the profiler on the subscriber database there were replication statements still chugging away.

The replication monitor was showing the error icon and the error in the detailed error text area but in the grid above it would ocassionally tell me the actual operation that was being performed.

Long story short, eventually the replication initialisation completed sucessfully but it appeared there several times that it had hung or stopped becuase of the error.

Also when I right clicked on the subscriber node within management studio and selected "View Synchronisation Status" it showed that the agent was stopped (start button enabled and stop button disabled), but when I hit start it told me that there was a process already running.

Madness!! 

Seems that XML data type columns are not replicated (via merge replication anyway) between sites. Bummer! 

My table with the XML data type column had data at one site, not at the other and vice versa. 

Luckily I'm not doing anything XMLy on the data (I didn't create the column but I wouldn't have forseen any concequences like this either), so I was able to create a new varchar(max) column and populate at each site. The data is the replicated to each site ok.

Would nice to have a pre-replication utility to rip through a database and warn for these types of situtations. In a previous post I ran into a similar issue with transactional replication and update of text columns at a subscriber.