Well, an interesting approach. Alas, I'd rather not stray so far into the realm of workarounds but try to solve the issue in a more standard and mean-to-be way. Also it has to work on windows and several unix flavours. My favorite solution would be the boost community would consider to include timouts in sync IO hence making it useful and adding value to asio.
I'm not sure whether I understand correctly what you suggest but wouldn't that affect the socket itself rather than the code using it?
In my case the socket is a static object and protected via mutex so there's no thread ownership in general sense.
Well, my suggestion was the following:
If the socket is blocked in a thread, the thread is blocked as well (and luckily boost::thread recognizes it as an iterruption point). Issue interrupt to that thread and the socket's wait will be interrupted. I don't remember If the socket is consistent after this operation, but I know it worked and I was able to close it as if nothing happened.
Hope that clarifies the issue,
Ovanes