Microsoft say this about Winsock error 10054 - WSAECONNRESET:

An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host. This normally results if the peer application on the remote host is suddenly stopped, the host is rebooted, the host or remote network interface is disabled, or the remote host uses a hard close (see setsockopt for more information on the SO_LINGER option on the remote socket). This error may also result if a connection was broken due to keep-alive activity detecting a failure while one or more operations are in progress. Operations that were in progress fail with WSAENETRESET. Subsequent operations fail with WSAECONNRESET.

Full details of Winsock TCP error 10054 - WSAECONNRESET:

Berkeley description: A connection was forcibly closed by a peer. This normally results from a loss of the connection on the remote socket due to a timeout or a reboot.

WinSock description: Same as Berkeley. On a datastream socket, the connection was reset. This reset could be generated locally by the network system when it detects a connection failure, or it might be received from the remote host (in TCP terms, the remote host sent a RST packet). This error is also possible on a datagram socket; for instance, this error could result if your application sends a UDP datagram to a host, which rejects it by responding with an ICMP Port Unreachable.

User suggestions: Some network systems have commands to report statistics. In this case, it might be possible to check the count of TCP RST packets received, or ICMP Port Unreachable packets. See other suggestions under WSAECONNABORTED.

See also: WSAECONNABORTED, WSAENETRESET, WSAETIMEDOUT