I've done a whole lot of asynchronous programming in my time. I find it useful to distinguish between background operations and asynchronous events . A "background operation" is something that you initiate, and some time later it completes.
An "asynchronous event" is something that's always going on independent of your program; you can subscribe, receive the events for a time, and then unsubscribe.
IMO using a thread pool is the way to go WRT processing the input. Take a look at http://smartthreadpool.codeplex.com. It provides a very nice API (using generics) for waiting on results.
You could use this in conjunction with Asynchronous Server Socket implementation. It may also be worth your while to take a look at Jeff Richter's Power Threading Lib: http://www.wintellect.com/Resources/Downloads.
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