I personally wouldn't take the advise anyone here posted. CGI:IRC makes it impossible to ban people because they get the @host of your webserver and not their own. CR Backpack will only let you connect to a CR server (and most servers do not run CR). What I would suggest is a regular java applet. EIRC is nice (and free), but it hasn't been developed in a while, but you can get it at
http://eirc.sourceforge.net EIRC supports joining multiple channels, and many other nice features that most java chats don't. If you don't like EIRC I'd say try jIRC. JIRC is not free (costs $30 last I checked) and it only lets you join 1 channel, but it gets the job done. You can get a trial copy of jIRC at
http://www.jpilot.com 
