I'm posting this here incase anyone else runs into this problem.
The IMON component of Eset NOD32 anti-virus can cause application crashes.
Initially we thought this was a bug in the JVM socket code, but after some heavy debugging, we tracked it down to the IMON component from NOD32.
Eset isn't explicit but there is evidence of a bug in their IMON component
See http://www.eset.com/support/nodfaq2.htm#issues
(Apache, Legato)
Other communities have run into this...
CVS Wiki
http://www.cvsnt.org/wiki/Faq#head-2ce95cedb3ed9f135ac3cc9712d817d4688a240e
Emule forums
http://forum.emule-project.net/lofiversion/index.php/t85888.html
This showed up frequently when launching a subprocess from the java app and doing socket based communication. (We were doing JINI discovery)
Enabling logging in the java classes seemed to aid the timing and made it reproducable.
sun.rmi.level = ALL
com.sun.jini.level = ALL
net.jini.level = ALL
#
# An unexpected error has been detected by HotSpot Virtual Machine:
#
# EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION (0xc0000005) at pc=0x7c918fea, pid=5560, tid=4852
#
# Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (1.5.0_04-b05 mixed mode)
# Problematic frame:
# C [ntdll.dll+0x18fea]
#
-------------------
Stack: [0x184e0000,0x18520000), sp=0x1851f04c, free space=252k
Native frames: (J=compiled Java code, j=interpreted, Vv=VM code, C=native code)
C [ntdll.dll+0x18fea]
C [ntdll.dll+0x104b]
Java frames: (J=compiled Java code, j=interpreted, Vv=VM code)
j java.net.SocketInputStream.socketRead0(Ljava/io/FileDescriptor;[BIII)I+0
j java.net.SocketInputStream.read([BII)I+84
...
The stacktrace in the log file does not show all the dll's. When we caught the crash in Visual Studio, it was evident that imon.dll was causing the problem. Disabling IMON elimintated the crash.