Interesting RMI/Windows issue 
we've been using a scheduling server at work to automatically schedule jobs programatically. It uses RMI and I've been working on a real interesting problem which would just manifest itself as a socket write exception. After having gone through the usual checking to make sure that it's not a connectivity issue, etc I finally narrowed it down to an interesting fact about RMI on Windows.
Somewhere within the Sun implementation someone is not handling spaces appropriately. Since we use Maven on Windows for dev work all the third party libraries end up in 'Documents And Settings..' folder on C drive. Note the space in there. This was causing RMI heartburn though the manifestation of the problem as a socket write exception was a mis-direction. See:
http://www.velocityreviews.com/forums/t126367-spaces-in-path-to-app-causing-rmi-fits-with-malformedurlexception.htmlSo I found the RMI properties, one of which allows users to see debug info:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/guide/rmi/javarmiproperties.htmlwhich revealed the actual problem.
Needless to say everything works fine in production land since it runs on Linux.
Fun times =)
