I can't disable publications

Enterprise Manager hangs every time I try to disable publications. I
tried stopping, then deleting individual subscriptions before trying to
delete the publication, but EM would hang after each one. I gave it 30
minutes to complete, but it never came back. Now I have phantom
subscriptions on the remote machines, even though the distributor shows
none.
I've always been able to follow the above steps before. I don't know
why it suddenly went bonkers.
I've tried rebooting the server (this is a production system, so I'm
hesitant to do that again), and that had no effect. I don't have
physical access to the machine.
Is there a manual way to safely disable publishing and then use the
wizard (or manually) to enable it again?
BTW, this is merge replication.
try running sp_droppublication manually from QA.
Either that or run sp_who2 to figure out which process is blocking.
Sometimes you get better results if you issue a master.dbo.xp_cmdshell 'net
stop SQLServerAgent' before attempting the drop.
Hilary Cotter
Looking for a SQL Server replication book?
http://www.nwsu.com/0974973602.html
Looking for a FAQ on Indexing Services/SQL FTS
http://www.indexserverfaq.com
"vibrantice@.hotmail.com" <rob.bartlett@.gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1128814964.404168.281580@.g47g2000cwa.googlegr oups.com...
> Enterprise Manager hangs every time I try to disable publications. I
> tried stopping, then deleting individual subscriptions before trying to
> delete the publication, but EM would hang after each one. I gave it 30
> minutes to complete, but it never came back. Now I have phantom
> subscriptions on the remote machines, even though the distributor shows
> none.
> I've always been able to follow the above steps before. I don't know
> why it suddenly went bonkers.
> I've tried rebooting the server (this is a production system, so I'm
> hesitant to do that again), and that had no effect. I don't have
> physical access to the machine.
> Is there a manual way to safely disable publishing and then use the
> wizard (or manually) to enable it again?
> BTW, this is merge replication.
>
sql