curious results from md5

Then perhaps you want to binary scan it into a variable...

binary scan [md5 [IP::client_addr]] i4 md5ary

This will return the MD5 hash into 4 32-bit values as a list in md5ary. If you are only interested in using, say the first 4 bytes of the hash, then you could do:

binary scan [md5 [IP::client_addr]] ii3 md5var junk

This will put the first 4 bytes into the variable md5var and the rest in junk. Note: this would also be the equivalent of [lindex 0 md5ary] from the first example.

Good luck.