In my experience from debugging C programs:

- Use valgrind (or gdb)! Your segfault should be simpler to find than a memory leak, because you know what line the segfault happens on.

- If you have a value that's getting mangled (pointer getting overwritten by a write to another address) and you can't figure out why, use watchpoints to see when that address is getting touched. http://sourceware.org/gdb/onlinedocs/gdb/Set-Watchpoints.htm...

- Find a minimal program to reproduce the problem. It's gross, but I used to actually just take a copy of the code and cut things out until the bug stopped, then look at the last thing I cut. You can do this as a binary search - only run the first half, check for the bug, only run the second half, check for the bug, repeat on the buggy half.

As I said, segfaults are a lot easier than this kind of problem (not that they're easy when you start out). Don't be discouraged! I would help out too, but you'd need to send everything to reproduce the bug (client code, server code, server platform, etc.)