Thanx Michael! I did not notice the consistency of the times. I went back and checked and they are almost always 16 minutes and 15 seconds. Both machines are inside the hospital but I checked the vendor machine (win2k3 server) and the windows firewall is not running. Since we have many other connections coming from the HIS to other vendors without this problem, I don’t think it is our UNIX keepalive setting but I’ll try to get it checked. An interesting thing happened as I was checking things on the vendor server though. The java object/image that represents the connection and the command window that is opened at the same time and stays open, both closed and came back like a screen re-paint. I will pass this on to the vendor to see if he can get this resolved. Thanx!