replication timeout

i am receiving the following error on my distribution task every 2 minutes:
S1T00[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Timeout expired

the synch task worked perfectly so i know the servers can talk to each other.
i`m also able to connect to each server from enterprise manager.
of course there`s no good explanation for this error in BOL or on the MS site.
does anyone know what it means and whether or not i can make it go away?
is replication working? if i do a select count(*) on certain tables on each
server, the count isn`t matching. it matched yesterday when i setup replication.

since i now have users dependent on the replication server for reporting,
i`d like to be 100% confident that the data is good.

thanks, André