I've never had any issues with mIRC before, and I've been using it for numerous years and on multiple machines / OS's.
I've reinstalled WinXP this week for the hundredth time and suddenly I get the software connection abort error.
I've done nothing different than the previous tens of times I reinstalled WinXP, AND I always just copy the same mIRC installation folder from my backup CD so I don't have to change any settings or so.

How can this happen??? Now I tried connecting with a different IRC client (Xchat) and suddenly it gave me the exact same problems, so it's definitely NOT mIRC related... What else could it be????