'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

Hey, I'm planning (still planning) to make my puzzle run on BOTH Windows AND *nix. (Though I don't know how I'd accomplish it. :-D)

At least to me, Windows has 2 different networking modes.

The first is just like *nix, but worse: it has only a handful of FDs, it doesn't treat files and sockets the same way, etc. All these are the lowercase function names.

But then there are the CamelHump functions, which provide functionality I've never heard in Unix before. Like a function call to accept a connexion, based on the IP. (As opposed to accept(), check IP, and close().) It also provides a nice multi-threaded replacement for select().

But I agree with your frustration. Writing good code means going by standards, and not using platform-specific hacks.