To answer my own question --
It looks to me as if the wait mode for a pipe is actually a property of the handle to the pipe, not of the pipe itself. The server and the client both can change the wait mode of their respective handles to the same named pipe, so it must be true that you can have different wait modes on each end of the same named pipe - otherwise the API wouldn't allow it, if the pipe wouldn't work that way.
And, it turns out, that all Win32 pipes are named pipes - anonymous pipes have automatically-generated names created by the OS but never shown to the pipe users.
It also looks like .net remote is yet another api to learn - Win32 named pipes don't really work in .net apparently.
I dunno, as time goes by, the whole .NET thing seems stupider and stupider to me. A write once, run everywhere architecture that only runs on Win32/Win64 machines anyway.
This year Gates is retired and the Micro$oft OS head guy has been replaced.
Menchar
Maybe I'll turn into a linux/unix guy in my old age ...
