Merge replication - can't create snapshot – timeout I have a SQL Server 2008 database, and I need a merge replication because I want to sync with mobile devices afterwards.

So I created a replication but when it comes to start the snapshot agent, the agent tries to start for about 20 minutes and then it shows the message:

The replication agent has not logged a progress message in 10
minutes. This might indicate an unresponsive agent or high system
activity. Verify that records are being replicated to the destination
and that connections to the Subscriber, Publisher, and Distributor are
still active.


There aren't any other error messages, neither in the snapshot-agent-status-window nor in the agent-log-window.

I don't have the administrator of the domain, but the local administrator and a domain user with admin-privileges. Both have all rights to database, are in the access-list of the replication.

The server agent runs on the local administrator-account and there are *3 Merge Replications   working on the server *

The job runs also under the local administrator.
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