Best Practice & Other

Hi All
I have the following replication setup:
Replication Type: Transactional
Database Size: Circa 35gb
Articles: All articles are published and are required to be at the
subscriber.
Server1: Publisher, SQL 2000 Sp3 (W2k3 sp1)
Server2: Distributor, SQL 2000 Sp4 (W2k3 R2 sp1)
Server3: Subscriber SQL 2000 Sp3 (W2k3 sp1)
Server 3 has the pull subscription.
Other Info: Server 2 did have SQL2005 installed. It's since been
uninstalled and resolved some transactional issues.
This is the environment that I have inherited.
Based on reading around, this appears to be an acceptable best
practice method. I might press against throwing SP4 on server 1 and
server 3.
Are there any amazing troubleshooting tips for this process around?
there are times when the transactional replication does not work. I
think it times out so I'm looking at changing the time out to 3000
seconds.
One issue I've found is that there was a duplicated transaction that
managed to get through. This crashed the envrionment and there was no
choice but to create a new snapshot - it takes hours. How could we
best avoid this? If we deleted these transactions from the subscriber
(difficult due to referential integrity) how would the system know to
replicate them again?
Another one that we've had is where the old transactions are held in
the log. I need to flush them out so that the log can be truncated and
then reduced in size. Any further hints and tips?
I'm simply after some good practice methods to help troubleshoot and
plan the replication process since we're investing time and resource
in it rather heavily. We'll move to 2005 once things are stable.
Thanks in advance for the help.
Simon
Hi Paul
Thanks for the advice. Can you think of any really good
troubleshooting methods when things are gone wrong. I don't mind how
generic they are, it's just good to excercise the brain on new ways of
handling problems.
Cheers
Simon