Sockets in vb.net

Hi everybody,
I am writing a socket based program that will be a client for a linux socket server, however I have created a timer and stuck 1 line of code in it (socketObject.Receive (xxxxx)). If I set the timer to 5000 (5 seconds) the program will run fine, however anything below 4500 will crash the program? Is there another method/way of grabbing data from the socket? Does the receive function wait for a X number of seconds beofre continuing executuion? OR is there just a better way to grab data from the socket that I am not seeing?

-Neil

try
......
catch e as exception
msgbox e.tostring
end try