That is what mIRC used to do when it had no support for the * hidden key... the reason the behaviour was changed (in mIRC 5.91 in 2001) is that users on networks that support * as a hidden key reported that mIRC treating * as an actual key resulted in various side-effects. I can't quite remember what those were but there's a wonderfully ambiguous comment next to the line of spaghetti code that handles hidden keys that warns me not to fiddle with it... :-P
