WinHTTP and Connection: close

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Having a strange problem on Windows 2003 32-bit server and WinHTTP.
I have a C/C++ application that uses WinHTTP that was working fine for many years. Today I encountered a strange situation while getting response from Apache/PHP application. WinHttpReadData returns a timeout error while reading the response.
However, when executing the application under the debugger, I noticed, that, in fact, all data were read OK. The problem is caused by TCP connection closure. The situation is like this:

1. WinHTTP application POSTs request (some XML document).
2. PHP application responses OK with "Connection: close" and "Content-Length: 7508" headers.
3. WinHTTP reads all data successfully and I see TCP ACK that aknowledges all data in the MS Network Monitor.
4. This is where the problem starts. Nobody wants to close TCP connection. I can see various ACKs coming from WinHTTP and PHP until WinHTTP resets the connection and my application gets a timeout error. If I call WinHttpReadData with the
buffer length that exactly match the Content-Length value, I get all the data successfully.
5. So, should WinHTTP terminate TCP connection after receiving all data declared in "Content-Length" header? Or it is a bug on the server side, since it sent "Connection: close" header?
I tried various options on WinHTTP side, like enabling and disabling Keep-Alive, but it doesnt change anything.

Thank you in advance.


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