However, when he kicked off the job, the job would always fail. The reason was the same as above. While he had permissions to the directory in question, the SQLServerAgent user account did not. He immediately realized what the issue was because he understood the context with which the job was running, changed the permissions, and his job worked. This only leaves the domain user account as a valid option.
Replication can be a tough cookie and a lot of people avoid it all together.
I ll have to admit that I haven t used replication a lot, because I haven t had a need to do so. However, there are some things to consider which will influence our choice of user accounts. Each has its own SQL Server installation. Customer support sees a subset of the loan data, and we ve created a publication based on that subset. We ve also created a publication for loan systems which has everything.