You have two options : 1. separate accept() in different thread ( one thread per a listening socket ) which, when I think about it now, means all the stuff - socket, listen, bind accept etc. goes in the thread - the so called "ServerThread" 2. make your socket descriptors non blocking in windows I think this is done by using ioctlsocket( FIONBIO .... ) . I've never tryed it in windows, in unix select returns the listening nonblocking socket that accepted a connection, so I assume it is the same in windows.