Continuous Merge Replication questions

Ok excuse my lack of knowledge in this department and hopefully someone
can help easily.
When using Merge replication with continuous updating subscribers, it
appears when there is a network outage (as everywhere will get sooner or
later) that it will not try to update until I manually push synchronize.
So that sort of makes it appear useless in my eyes.
Can someone tell me how I can avoid this problem. The only way I have
been able to get around is by setting the subscriber to update every
minute but this is not ideal.
Can the calls to publish and synchronize be coded? if so please help.
And the other query I have is what is the difference between continuous
updating subscribers and transactional replication? Am I missing something?
Cheers,
Tim
You could hardcode the jobsteps to work in a loop (step 3 -> step 2) to
have it automatically restart.
For subscriber updates, merge is similar to transactional replication with
queued updating subscribers. A few differences...
TR works on a transaction basis while merge works on changed data ie 1000
updates to a row will be 1000 stored proc calls for tr while 1 updated row
in merge.
Text and Image changes are treated differently.
Requirement for PK in TR.
More conflict resolvers in merge than queued updating subscribers.
Cheers,
Paul Ibison SQL Server MVP, www.replicationanswers.com
(recommended sql server 2000 replication book:
http://www.nwsu.com/0974973602p.html)