Well, that being said, now that I am running AS 5.8.3 the signaling problem seems to have been cleared up. I am currently testing with a modified client that contiously loops through connecting to this server and starting and stoping the pings to see if any of the children(I'll make sure these don't visit a bookstore!) get in a "hung" state.

As a side note, I was concerned about memory usage on the server side after several days of runtime and many child births/deaths. This does seem to be a problem after letting my client loop through the start/stop process for an hour. More testing is in progress though!

Thanks for all the help:-)

Steve