Effective TCP/IP packet management

Ive experienced some times networking that multiple recvs will be waiting and in one call ul recieve them all,is there anyway to stop this? Or my next question being whats a good way to deal with it?

I planned on recving a large buffer of around 600,having the first string with a space behind it being the length of the first packet in my list just incase something screwy happend in the networking.. then skip past the space and keep runing threw packets till ur out or u get only a part of a packet...

Ideas? Improvments?

PS: Also posting in win32!