In order to determine exactly what was happening, I decided to run a ProcMon trace while I ran and closed the program in question.
The resulting log was huge... most of it was basic registry reads that windows itself does to determine the various possible settings, appinit dlls, etc.
However, none of it was "bad" or something it wouldn't be accessing- most of the keys and files the program accessed were, not surprisingly, related to winsock.
However, this is the caveat! The Antispyware program karnac is using may be hard-coded to flag certain programs that access these keys as "spyware".
In fact this is a well known "caveat" of many anti-spyware programs. An example is the following article, which discusses a similar issue with one of the authors programs, and outlines exactly how easy it is to "sneak under the velvet rope" as he describes it.
http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2008/01/29/are-you-safer-now.aspxI think that the reason it triggered the anti-spyware program was merely because it "hinted" at having references to certain registry keys- much as the author of the aforementioned article encountered with mcaffee.