More on ECONNRESET/EPIPE sympton

[The Purple Panzer]

It's really frustrating, but I've been seeing some odd client crashes as I develop the corner of ta map (in both 2.0.4 and 2.0.5b). The client exits immediately when trying to (or just after) downloading the map; the server gives me a message saying something about "ECONNRESET/EPIPE", but in looking into that it seems that it's just an artifact of the client unexpectedly dying.

So, say in the map file I've got lines/objects like this:
A, B, C, D
and I get the crash. Then I'll take out D, leaving A,B,C, and the crash will go away. They I might add a simple block (the old box), so I've got A, B, C, E; I'll get the crash. Then I'll take that out, and be back to A,B,C, and now the crash will happen then; indeed, I can get it with an almost empty map file. It seems that once it starts it kind of hangs around waiting to happen opportunisticly.

When I get it I can reboot my XP machine, and I may still get it the first time I try the map, or not. The fact that I can't repeatably modify the map file to get back to a running state suggests that it's not a particular map element per se; more likely it's some odd condition that I manage to reach that causes the crash, but I find it hard to imagine what.

Any ideas would be most appreciated. I might want to try to go as far as compiling my own client (but I don't have the .net environment; I stopped paying Microsoft for C++, etc. updates a while back; but I might grab it). I wouldn't mind getting into the code in depth if that's what it takes to figure out what's going on.

Needless to say, this has slowed me a little. I want to try a few more things, then I might post the map as it is to see if other people get the same behavior (and perhaps not; maybe it is something strange about this platform).

Is there by any chance any variant of a client that would trap errors and (say) print out some diagnostic info before exiting?