no.. not quite... its a necissary windows file. The major task of the data transport portion of the Ws2_32.DLL is to serve as a sort of traffic manager between service providers and applications. Consider several different service providers interacting with the same application. Each service provider interacts strictly with the Ws2_32.DLL. the problem here is, the Ws2_32.DLL has no knowledge about how requests to service providers are realized; this is up to the service provider implementation. so when the Ws2_32.DLL passes the transport service provider's socket descriptor on up to the Windows Sockets application, the applications are free to take advantage of socket descriptors that the file system handles, if they so choose. like ping-attacks and such... at least thats my understanding of how its relating here...