i have two servers this is happenning on.

each has a maintenance plan with the same options selected...

General Tab
- applies to all databases
Optimizations Tab
- reorganize data and index pages
- change free space per page to: 10%
- remove unused space from database files
- shrink database when it grows beyond: 50mb
- amount of free space to remain after shrink: 10%
- schedule: occurs every 1 week on Sunday at 1:00am
Integrity Tab
- check database integrity
- include indexes
- attempt to repair any minor problems
- schedule: occurs every 1 week on Sunday at 12:30am
Complete Backup Tab
- backup the database as part of the maintenance plan
- to disk
- use the default directory
- create a subdirectory for each database
- remove files older than 7 days
- extension: BAK
- schedule: occurs every 1 day at 2:00am
Transaction Log Backup Tab
- backup the transaction log of the database as part of the maintenance
plan
- to disk
- use the default backup directory
- create a subdirectory for each database
- remove files older than 7 days
- extension: TRN
- schedule: occurs every 1 days at 2:30am
Reporting Tab
- write report a text file in directory: C:\MSSQL7\LOG
- delete text report files older than 14 days
- write history to the table msdb.dbo.sysdbmaintplan_history
- limit rows in the table to 1000

the maintenance plan will run and not produce any errors, but despite having
"all databases" selected for the maintenance plan, two or three databases
simply aren't backed up.

- the sql agent is running as localsystem
- the backups are to a local disk
- there are no errors in the SQL logs or from the maintenance plan

and here's the weird part:

- looking at the sql logs shows all the other databases being backed up
successfully, and the ones which i am fighting with are simply not there.
sql doesn't even try to touch them to back them up.

i was getting maintenance plan errors on these DBs, but turning off the
verify option after backup made that go away. here's the error:

BackupDiskFile::OpenMedia: Backup device
'C:\MSSQL7\BACKUP\phpbb\phpbb_db_200310301200.BAK' failed to open. Operating
system error = 2(The system cannot find the file specified.).

- if i backup the DBs manually from EM on the server, they do not get backed
up
- if i connect over the network (as 'sa') and manually backup the DBs they
are backed up, but then the files are deleted when the nightly maintenance
plan runs (it is set to delete backups over 7 days old, but the manual
backups were made just the day before so i don't think that is the problem)
- i have tried changing the sql agent service logon to the administrator
with no effect
- i have also made sure the 'sa' account has db_owner rights to all the DBs
- there is no other job running which would be getting in the way of this
one

anyone? anyone?