We observed a stack-trace in which, while handling an error, QHttpNetworkConnectionChannel::close()'s call to its socket->close() triggered (when the socket was a QSslSocket) a flush() which asked its backend to transmit() which tripped over the original error, which duly triggered endless recursion. Transiently clear the socket member, during its ->close(), to prevent this; do the same in abort(), to preserve its structural correspondence to close(). Restructure both so that any recursive call's setting of state is overwritten by the top-level call's, while this still uses the prior socket state (not the state after close() or abort() and any recursion) to determine final state. Task-number: QTBUG-56476 Change-Id: If69e97f7a77a729bf2338ed14214c65aa95f8b05 Reviewed-by: Timur Pocheptsov <timur.pocheptsov@qt.io>