loop problem

Hi All, I'm currently working with a friends that want to use irc protocol at his work cause there is only http proxy. so it is very easy, i found phpIRC and everything works fine...He is very happy.... i've just seen that some process are always connected. this is really weird. so i started to watch that on details and it seems that the loop which dispatch messages don't stop when Apache client is away.... Am i wrong ? To sum up, i have a PHP script that loop and send messages to client but when client go away script continue to run. did i see some ghost that does not exist ? Thanks for your answer Manu