[BiO BB] NCBI web service

[Ethan Strauss]

Hi, 
	I have been using the NCBI eutils web service from a C#
application to automatically retrieve additional information (species,
links to the Gene db etc) about BLAST hits from the gi numbers. This
works when it works, but I have been having a lot of trouble with the
web service. It is slow and frequently I get Web service errors (The
underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a
send) which seem to related to timeout and proxies and keepalive and
other stuff I don't really understand. 
	Anyway, Is there another web service that I might use to get the
same sorts of information from gi numbers or accession numbers? I need
to get species and associations with the gene database. If you know how
to get the NCBI service to work better for me, that would be good too. I
would like to get the full description line, but could live without it.
It is important for this application that I can get the info from a web
service. 
Thanks!
Ethan