Mark and Yanagawa,

1) Your help is greatly appreciated.

2) Why this post had little info.... 
My first post http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=cd8ff714.0202200530.5181e9cf%40posting.google.com&output=gplain
had a lot of info but no one replied. So I reposted with less info,
sorry if I rushed it.

3) Threading.... 
Thank you for this pointer, I will add this next.

4) client code doesn't send "\n" and so the server is waiting for "\n"
on IO#gets, but it's just a my guess.

A very good guess Yanagawa, that was exactly the problem. It would
have taken me weeks to get to this solution, thank you.

Have a good weekend.

Regards,

Rick