well, I don't know the answer to the first question but I probably found out the answer for the seconf one. the reason why the program got crazy is that since it's multi threading there's a situation where an event is raised which cause the system to freak out. I still haven't found why it freaks out but if I prevent the event to be raised than logging is OK and client application is not exit its operation.

I'll be happy though if someone could answer my first question above - why is the length of buffer = 0? could it be because I use memcpy in my encode/ decode buffer functions?

thanks again,
Lenna