Merge replication - can't create snapshot – timeout
So it works again...

Maybe someone else has got the same issue one day, so i post the solution here:

I researched on the server and found out, the sql server service is running under a local user. The reason for this is, that there were problems with the backupsystem, used by our customers and so they changed it years ago.

Because of the local user account the 15404-Error occures.

Knowing, that i mustn't use domain-accounts, I also solved the initial problem with my snapshot-agent. I searched for hours (nearly days ;) ) and it was just this little change:

When the Replication is created, the job is created too. The job has three steps. The Job-owner is the local-admin, also for the server-agent-service. But the second step of my job (replictionsnapshot) has one setting: run as. And by default this isn't the job-owner but the user running the creation, in my case my domain-account.

Now, that I set it to the local-administrator as well everything works fine again.

Thanks, Karl