i asked cobalt about the broken pipe problem and here is what they have to say about it:
The broken pipe error is given when the telnet session is stopped unexpectedly.

Could the program that you are running be resetting the telnet server?

i never questioned alex software before but it sounds like the program is not running properly.
i never had a problem with links1.1 verifying links and it was alot faster.
is it possible alex made a mistake with this one and fixed it with link sql?
i know you can verify certain links with sql version.
not finding a solution to this problem is no big deal. as soon as i install mysql on the new server, i'm switching to linksql (about 2-3 months)