Question about sockets in TN5250j

Greetings.

My company has a Java-based TN5250 client (I think it's probably a few 
years older than TN5250j) that I helped develop, and it has a chronic, 
but highly intermittent problem with the socket crashing (especially if 
it's a secure socket). Earlier this week, the problem was manifesting 
itself with connections to two different hosts, with the average 
connection life measured in *seconds* (sometimes crashing before I even 
had a chance to sign on).

And we were told that the official IBM emulator (whatever they're 
calling it this week) was staying connected.

On Tuesday, when one particular box was at its worst, I downloaded 
TN5250j (at the suggestion of a fellow member of the Midrange List), and 
ran it in parallel with our emulator, and I found that TN5250j was 
somehow able to remain connected (just like the IBM emulator), while our 
emulator was constantly losing its socket.

Does anybody here have any insights into why this would happen?

--
James H. H. Lampert
Touchtone Corporation