I recently came across this issue and thought it might be worth a mention here. If you have some really big packages and don't see any of your changes reflected on the Child Sites then this may be your issue.
Symptoms
Changes made to an SMS 2003 package/program properties for a large package (such as Office 2007) are not reflected on the Child Site.
The Distmgr.log on the Child Site server may show that Package XXX000xx is currently being processed, and it may stay in this state for days, and/or it does not update on the Child Primary Site's view of the package for several days.
It seems any change that is made to this packages properties is not getting updated although other packages and Site settings are getting replicated down to the Child Primary Site properly. When looking at the distmgr logs on the child site you may see the same files trying to be processed for this problem package and not getting processed for some time, even days depending on the size of the problem package.
Cause
This can occur if the package that is being updated is being processed on the Child Primary Site to a remote Distribution Point (DP) share over a slow link, and this package is several GB in size. The large size combined with the slow link merely means that this processing will take a very, very long time. This is why we were seeing the message “Package ID XXX0000XX is currently being processed.” This indicates that the server is processing this package (not the pkg file that is currently in queue) and as a result is busy and not able to process the incoming change right now.
Resolution
Once you're in this situation the best resolution is patience. Once the package processing from the Child Primary to the remote DP finishes, the package changes will be processed normally as expected.
More Information
If you can create a Secondary Site then this process would use a compressed file instead of raw copy to a DP at the remote location. You also have the option to use the Courier Sender method of updating the DP rather than doing this over the wire. Courier Sender allows software to be sent between SMS sites by CD or other media, rather than across the network. This is particularly useful in situations where the available network bandwidth is low or too expensive to use for the delivery of large packages.
For more information regarding methods of Software Distribution, see Chapter 5, "Distributing Software," in the Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 Operations Guide:
Hope this helps,
Clifton Hughes | Senior Support Engineer