Test Linked Server Connection SQL 2000

I€™m trying to resolve an issue and wonder if anybody has ever run into and possibly had a resolution for.

I wrote a custom conflict resolvers to manage data at the column level. What I needed to do to achieve this was to use a remote query to the mobile subscriber that raised the conflict. I€™m trying to put in a rule that if there are any issues connecting to the subscriber I want to use the default conflict resolver and move forward. Here is my issue, it seems there is no way I can test a connection without getting a critical error that I can€™t seem to trap. Example

I was trying to do

Select * from [linkedserver].[database].[dbo].[incident]
If @@error <> 0
use default conflict resolver

What I did to test this was I changed the linked server authentication to an incorrect password to get the following error that there is no way to trap.

Server: Msg 18456, Level 14, State 1, Line 1
Login failed for user 'sa'.

Does anybody have an idea how to trap this? In SQL 2005 there is a stored procedure

sp_testlinkedserver to handle this but I need this to work in SQL 2000 also, it seems many people have ran into this issue on the web and I tried to get the one where sqldmo is used to test connection but that will not work since I wont always know the password. I would like to just check the @@error value after trying to run a remote query.

Thank you,
Pauly C