HO* is not a valid response from the PLC and doesn't sounds like it is a response from the PLC.
Depending on how your applicaition is written, you may have lost some characters when reading from the Ethernet buffer.
You can use wire-shark program to sniff the TCP/IP communication between the application program and the PLC and see what transpires between the two.
Even though point-to-point protocol will work, it may be better to use the multi-point protocol which includes checksum (FCS) and allow you to verify if the received string contain errors.