a good analogy of a socket is that of a telephone once you connect 2 sockets together (place a call) you can pass data from one point to the other (have a conversation) the socket that waits for the connection is defined as the server, the socket that initiate the call is defined as client within a single address (IP) you can have several sockets listening on different extensions known as ports popular standard ports include - 25 for SMTP (mail send), 110 - POP3 (mail read) , 80 - HTTP, 119, NNTP (news) , 6667- IRC etc. Arnon > >OK... stupid question. I thought a Socket was just a special type of >control. Or is it more complicated then that? >=D) Rox >