Happy with my Winsock work-arounds for my small client-/server-test, I decided to try integrating the Network use into my target project, and got nothing but trouble. Again, things that work happily under Unix simply fail under windows. My best guess at the moment is that the socketToHandle conversion used within accept and connectTo simply doesn't work as advertised, under windows (at least, handle-based operations such as hGetLine or hClose on the handles returned by accept/connectTo results in errors, whereas avoiding the socketToHandle conversion and using Network.Socket.send and Network.Socket.recv yields some improvements..). A little more digging in mail-archives brings up the following rather discouraging thread/message: Socket library ghc 5.02.1 http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/2001-November/002673.... in which Sigbjorn summarizes: FYI, in case you're planning on doing socket programming with GHC-5.02 on a Win32 platform, stay away from using the higher-level Socket module, since its IO.Handle based view of sockets is just broken. Stick with the lower-level SocketPrim interface instead. Is it just me doing something stupid, or is this problem still pertinent, for the higher-level Network module in GHC-5.04? If the latter, could this please be flagged in the GHC documentation, so that people don't have to rediscover the problem by painful debugging? (if the former, any suggestions on what I should try instead?) Is anyone else here using GHC's Network module under Windows? Claus FPI: foreign problem interface