I have a class that inherits from TcpClient. In that class I have a method to process responses. In that method I call I get the NetworkStream with MyBase.GetStream and call Read on it. This works fine, excpet the first call to read blocks too long. And by too long I mean that the socket has recieved plenty of data, but won't read it until some arbitrary limit is reached. I can see that it has recieved plenty of data using the packet sniffer WireShark. I have set the recieve buffer to small amounts, and very small amounts (like just a few bytes) to no avail. I have done the same with the buffer byte array I pass to the read method, and it still delays. Or to put it another way. I am download 600k. The download takes 5 seconds (at a little over 100k/second connection to the server which makes sense). The initial Read call takes 2-3 seconds and tells me only 256 bytes are availble (256 is the Recieve buffer and the size of the array I read in to). Then magically, the other few hundred thousand bytes can be read in 256 byte chunks in only a few process ticks each. Using a packet sniffer, I know that during those initial 2-3 seconds, the socket has recieved much more than just 256 bytes. My connection wasn't .25k/second for 3 seconds and then 400k for 2 seconds. How do I get the bytes from a socket as they come in?