Hello,

We have an C# VS.NET 2003 compact framework application running on Windows
Mobile 5.0, utilising MS SQL Server CE 2.0 against an Microsoft SQL Server
Standard Edition (8.00.2039 SP4) database server.

We have set anonymous subscriptions to expire after 14 days (default). Also,
we use basic authentication for the Windows Mobile 5.0 clients to connect
to our database backend through SSCESA20.DLL (Merge Agent). IIS and MSSQL
are on the same box (Windows Server 2003 X86 with RAM 3583 MB and four processors).
The Snapshot Agent runs once a week and we generate snapshots in the normal
snapshot folder. Of course, the snapshot format is Character mode format
so as to support heterogeneous subscribers and data transformations using
DTS.

We have a very strange issue: Although the anonymous subscriptions are set
to expire within 14 days of a subscriber NOT synchronizing with the backend
server, we have examples of particular subscribers that they have NOT synchronized
for more than a month and when they finally attempt to synchronize with the
backend server, the merge replication synchonization process completes successfully
(!), i.e. they don't get a message saying that the subscription to the publication
'XXXXXX' is invalid (i.e. expired) and that they need to reinitialize by
getting a new subscription.

The backend database has new data every day (10-30 records) and the Snapshot
Agent only runs once a week.

Can you please help me understand what is the reason for this issue ?

Thank you
Panos