All:

I'm not sure what all has been said on this topic, but I thought I'd
throw in that (only) one of our evaluation clients had this problem
("connection forcibly closed by the remote host") with our
application (connecting to a Linux server from an XP client, with
IBObjects, Delphi 6, components). It seemed to only take about 10
minutes for an inactive application to lose the connection. We never
did figure out why.

\.dm