Merge Replication parameterized row filtering, beware of the optimizations

I haven't blogged in a while, mostly due to my workload that has sky rocketed.
My most recent challenge is with SQL Server 2005 Merge Replication.

We have had quite a few undesirable effects when we upgraded our subscribers from ole good MSDE to SQL Server Express.
The side effects led to data loss and emergency fixes, in a really chaotic way. This data loss didn't happen with MSDE.

The article I recently published on DevX described a data loss scenario with SQL Server 2005 Ent as publisher/distributor and MSDE or SQLE as subscriber.

The scenario we got recently happens only with SQLE in the subscribers and is related to the parameterized filter optimizations in SQL Server 2005.

Tweaking the parameters @use_partition_groups and @keep_partition_changes produce different side effects that go from data loss to inability to merge the data, the parameterized filters stop working.

If you're interested on the subject hang on, I will publish repros in the next post.

If anyone knows how to set up the Windows Synchronization Manager for Verbose History Logging to output to a file, please comment here, all my attempts have failed.

Cheers and happy holidays!