I've searched far and wide, and so far have not been able to find any reference to this issue.
There is a merge replication setup on a SQL 2008 server, setup to replicate to SQL 2008 Express edition. We have similar setups in SQL 2005 AND SQL 2008 without issues. The setup is that the current merge replication snapshot file location is \\<ServerName>\Repldata\UNC\<SERVER_PUBLICATION>\20101229112828 which represents the file location of the latest snapshot which was just generated due to an obsolete snapshot.
The issue comes in when attempting to replicate against the server. The replication says that the schema script could not be propogated to the subscriber. Under normal circumstances I would say it's due to security issues with being able to read to the above folder, however this is not the case. The additional error that comes up is stating that it could not read the file along with an OS error 3 (The system cannot find the path specified).
What is unique about this, is that the subscriber is trying to download the snapshot from an old and now non-existent snapshot folder. Here is an copy of the error, noting the file location of "20091121130613" which no longer exists and is from an old snapshot.
The process could not read file '\\<servername>\repldata\unc\<Server_Publication>\20091121130613\Administration_21.sch' due to OS error 3. (Source: MSSQL_REPL, Error number: MSSQL_REPL0)
I either need to find out how to change on the distributor, publisher or subscriber the location of the folder, or find out how to reset it. Deleting the subscriber database and subscription from the server and setting them both up again has no affect, which points to me that it is stored somewhere in either the distribution database, publisher database, or msdb database on the subscriber. I have also tried reinitializing the subscriptino multiple times, again with no success.
Thanks, Don