Brett Wilms at myITforum.com

Last week I closed up a case with Microsoft concerning some orphaned distribution points (DPs from here on) that were still hanging around in our SMS 2003 SP3 database. I couldn't find much online on how to address this issue.  I did find a blog entry by Russ Slaten but I wasn't quite comfortable running the included VBS on my production environment in hopes that it would resolve my issue.  So, I gave Microsoft a call and opened a case.

Our scenario was as follows. The servers hosting the DP shares were decommissioned without us knowing. Once we found out, we deleted the DPs from all associated Packages and then deleted them from Site Systems on their appropriate Primary Site. However, because the servers were no longer around, things weren't totally cleaned up. Every day I would see entries in my Central Primary Site server's distmgr.log where SMS was not able to delete specific packages from these orphaned DPs.

Delete action for previously deleted package server '["Display=\\servername01\sms2003dp\"]MSWNET:["SMS_SITE=ABC"]\\servername01\sms2003dp\' for package 'ABC00002' will be ignored. 
Delete action for previously deleted package server '["Display=\\servername02\sms2003dp\"]MSWNET:["SMS_SITE=ABC"]\\servername02\sms2003dp\' for package 'ABC00002' will be ignored.

 Using SQL Server Management Studio, the Microsoft technician and I used the following queries to find if the DPs were still in our databases:

SELECT * FROM PkgServers WHERE NALPath like '%servername01%'
SELECT * FROM PkgStatus WHERE PkgServer like '%servername01%'

Once we confirmed these queries returned entries for the orphaned DPs (and ONLY the orphaned DPs) we checked to make sure we had a valid SMS backup. Once that was confirmed, we ran a delete query to clean things up:

DELETE FROM PkgServers WHERE NALPath like '%servername01%'
DELETE FROM PkgStatus WHERE PkgServer like '%servername01%'

And like that, I no longer have activity from non-existant DPs.