Symptoms

After (re-)creating a subscription to a pull merge replication publication from SQL Server Express 2005, the subscription fails to appear in Synchronization Manager. After further investigation, the symptom was determined to be restricted to non-Administrators.

Things To Check

• Make sure sp_addmergepullsubscription_agent was run with @enabled_for_syncmgr = 'TRUE'. This requirement differs from previous SQL Server versions where this was the default. When this parameter is not set to 'TRUE', the subscription will not appear in Synchronization Manager
• Make sure the subscription can be synchronized outside of Synchronization Manager (to confirm that it is a problem when run through replsync.dll - in Synchronization Manager). The easiest way to do this is using replmerg from the command-line.
• Make sure the user has permissions to write to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\80\Replication\Subscriptions. Without write permission, SQL Server will silently fail to appear in Synchronization Manager. Also, by default in many configurations, non-Administrators do not have write access to this key so it must be adjusted manually.

The last item is particularly important and required quite a bit of my time to determine... which resulted in the need for this post. Hopefully one of the above suggestions will help you avoid spending the same amount of time that I did to solve this problem.