Thank you for your effort on this. Did you try it on Windows 8? I tried it on Win7 sp1 and had same result as you except exception at disconnect.

It would be nice to have working desktop client. I'm not ready to abandon this idea just yet. But as I dig deeper into WEBSOCKETS more I realize that even if I somehow manage to create desktop client, there is no way that I can write application that will work from Win XP onwards.