Thread Safety
Any public static (Shared in Visual Basic) members of this type are safe for multithreaded operations. Any instance members are not guaranteed to be thread safe.

I have seen this for several classes in the help documentation, but what does it acctually mean. Why is it so important to use static members in a muti-threaded environment?

The class I am currently working on connects for a device given an IP and a port, if connect is sucessful it starts a receiving thread that will receive data from the device it is connected to.
Currently the receive method is a static method (because of the thread safety issue) and the receive method will update a static class property with the amount of data read.
The problem I noticed was that the value of the static property was retained after the class object went out of scope and the next time I created the class object, the value was what it was the previous time I received data.

So one solution I had was to set the static property to zero in the class constructor, and this worked just fine, but it seems more like a hack that a well designed class.

The other thing I was thinking about doing was to remove all the static key words and make every property and method instance members, but I am a little affraid of the thread safety issue.

Any comments or input would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Einar