I have been seeing this for several days as well. I am using PHP to call to the sandbox verifyReceipt function and the exact error I am getting when it fails is error 35 with the description as:OpenSSL SSL_connect: Connection reset by peer in connection to sandbox.itunes.apple.com:443This is an intermittent problem as it will work without issue sometimes. I thought the issue was resovled yesterday as things were working fine until this morning when it was broken again.

I have not heard anything from Apple regarding the bug I reported described in the original posting. I am planning on using one of my Code-Level Support questions available to my developer account to see if I can find a dev support engineer who can provide me further information on this issue. I total agree with chnbr that this is a very serious issue. I have worked up somewhat of a workaround. Prior to doing a contentsOfDirectoryAtPath I add a temporary folder. By doing this it appears to refresh the cache used by this routine so that it returns an accurate list of the files in that directory. This is by no means a complete solution because what I truly need is to receive a queryDidReceiveNotification which then will trigger my app to proceed with the task it needs to do when it learns a file has been added to that directory. I will keep this post updated as to any progress.