Abstract: A session recovery mechanism that permits the recovery of a session with a minimal delay to a user and with minimal data loss. When the client/server communications protocol process, such as TCP/IP process, issues an error message to a server and a client, the server and the client switch from a server data socket and a client data socket, respectively, to a new server data socket and a new client data socket, respectively. This switchover is achieved by having the client open a listening socket during its initialization process. Using the client listening socket, the client listens for a connection from the server to switch to a new data socket, in case of, for example, error messages from the TCP/IP process.