The JIS/SJIS conversion feature is broken and I'm betting it's never going to be fixed satisfactorily. One of the underlying problems is that when mIRC receives a line of text from the server, it won't know whether to apply the conversion to that particular line before the line is parsed to discover the channel name - but the channel name itself could change depending on whether the conversion is to be applied or not --- Do you see the problem here? It's a vicious cycle ;-)
(Sidenote: It's sort of like web browsers having to parse HTML pages before they come across the http meta-equiv charset setting, at which point they have to re-parse the page from the start.)
I propose that the JIS/SJIS conversion feature is ripped out altogether (because it's never going to work) and UTF-8 output is made the *default setting* in all new installs. Even if the former is not done, I insist the latter is. :-)
