It's been done. you need to learn how to search
No need to give me the attitude. I said quite clearly that I was not after a solution like that.
Anyway the
imgmirc.dll solution provided by
Oracel is the best solution for emoticons in mIRC, IMO. It fulfills all the criteria I outlined in my post, Thank you Oracel.
FYI: The imgmirc.dll uses a very clever IAT patching technique which patches the TextOut API. Pretty clever huh?