Let me start  by giving you the simplest answer and see if that
helps... try { ENTER YOUR sock = new ServerSocket, ect, HERE }catch
(EOFException e) ... although I find it odd to return  an
EOFException, more likely an IOException, for failure to connect  to
the client... but then again I'm only speculating... hope this does
not insult... but I've got to start somewhere...

The problem  is that it ALWAYS throws an EOF Exception, as the client
is trying to read  in the data  before the server  has a chance to send
it (the client recovers quicker after the initial handshake than the
server who has to find the data within a database, construct a packet
and send it out to the client.) I want the client to wait  until a
certain amount of data is available before continuing (or timeout if
the data doesn't present itself within 30 seconds).

Surely this is a common problem when writing  client/server
applications? Has anyone else had any experience with this problem?

As an aside, in a previous program (that used threads) I used the
code:
while(in.available() < 5)
{
try
{
sleep(10);
}
catch(InterruptedException e)
{
}
}
...which worked fine. However my current program does not use
threads, and I would have difficulty changing it to do so.
Plus the main method would then end up just calling:
thread.start();
thread.join();
which seems a bit wasteful. There must be a more elegant solution?