The insert failed. It conflicted with an identity range ch..

We have a fairly standard merge replication setup on SQL 2005 with MSDE
subscribers. (We previously used SQL 2000 with MSDE subscribers)

All of our published articles have the same properties:
@pub_identity_range = 250,000
@identity_range = 5,000
@threshold = 80

I've read this over many times:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms152543.aspx

The issue we are encountering happens for users who are working directly on
the publisher (not subscribers).

We have a table on our publisher that seems to be filling up it's identity
ranges in about once a month. It seems as though when it does fill up its
range of values that it doesn't get its new ranges soon enough and users
experience the error "The insert failed. It conflicted with an identity range
check constraint"

The SQL user that is doing all the inserts is a member of the db_owner fixed
database role, and therefore I believe it should be able to automatically
assign a new range.

What seems to be happening is for about one day every month users receive
the error and the next day the are able to insert more records and we have
not touched anything.

Can anyone explain this behavior or suggest how we could troubleshoot the
problem further?

Thanks!

Ben,
this is my understanding:
the allocation to the second range is automatic and doesn't require
synchronization. However, it doesn't use the threshold and instead relies on
the range filling up to completion. If you had one space left and did an
insert of 2 rows in a transaction, or some sort of bulk insert, even insert
into select...., then the new range wouldn't get allocated. Have a look at
the insert replication trigger to see some of this.
HTH,
Paul Ibison, www.replicationanswers.com