What can cause the following thing: once my client has connected to the server, passing its listening port as a message, the server responds by taking the ip from the sockaddr_in struct retrieved from accept(). when calling send() (after socket() and connect()), the server exits without any error messages - the program just closes - bam! this only seems to happen when i send the message to the correct ip address and port - sending it to a non-listening port somewhere only produces the normal SOCKET_ERROR. any ideas why that is so? thanks, crispy

programs don''t "just close" unless you hit windows in a particularly painful place.

go to debugger and step through that send() call.