I agree with the OP's suggestion: mIRC could really use a way to get rid of the taskbar item. Like some of the other repliers, I leave my client on 24 hours a day, and while I usually don't mind the taskbar item, I will sometimes decide to have a more than a few different applications open simultaneously. With my already dwindling taskbar space, mIRC (combined with Pidgin, which also cannot be active and absent from the taskbar) starts accounting for a significant portion of the unnecessarily used space.
What's interesting is, I seem to vaguely recall already having this ability at some point in time. I'm not sure if I had used a third party program or what, but the only method of removing taskbar items I've found recently is TrayIt, which results in an extra (dummy) system tray icon. One could then remove the normal system tray icon, but of course, then the status indications of the icon is no longer available. This same issue occurs in Pidgin. Their excuse for not resolving it was that it's a "windows OS issue." Considering mIRC is built specifically for Windows, I hope this is not the case here.
