Please excuse the attention grabbing headline, but I think it's important to get this message across to as many people as I can. I spent most of the past two days ripping a remoting application to pieces, re-writing it in VS 2003 + .Net v1.1 simply because of the Quick Console. I hope that posting this message will help some other poor individual out there that was having the same problem as I was..
Note: this bug isn't related to the remoting framework as such, but it is likely to occur during remoting debug because of the way you set up client / server comms

Thesymptomsof the problem are:

• you start you client and server applications as normal
• you decide to stop the client to make some modifications, leaving the server running
• when you restart the client it will not reconnect properly, but will simply hang. You will receive no exceptions and it will sit there forever. When the server is stopped you'll receive the normal "actively refused connection" exception on the client
  

I interpreted this error to mean that there could be a socket problem or maybe some weird leasing issue or perhaps the recompile of the client was causing versioning issues, GC problems, firewall problems or a multitude of other things! In the end I simply thought I had 'lost the plot' with remoting and starting copying the remoting equivalent of 'hello world' from websites to see what fundamental mistake I had made!
As it turns out, the problem is with the Quick Console and the bug has been reported here:
http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/viewfeedback.aspx?feedbackid=a4541d59-001c-42ce-b04b-daefe599599f
The recommendation is to disable the quick console option in the tools / debugging options and then everything starts working again.
I've heard that Quick Console will be dropped from the final release because it is not to the required standard. I can't say I'm going to shed a tear.
Steve
P.S. As is usually the case, I found the answer to this problem completely by mistake whilst looking for something else - hence this posting.