A few months ago, I switched from my old desktop computer to a new HP Pavillion dv6000 laptop running Vista Home Premium. After the switch, I began experiencing a strange problem while on IRC. Mysterious boxes, such as the two shown in
this image, began appearing at the beginning of some of my messages, seemingly at random. I have not been able to identify any pattern to the appearance of these boxes.
To complicate matters, the boxes are invisible to me. The screenshot shown above was taken by a friend. To me, the boxes simply do not appear. The only time I am aware of them is when a box prefaces a /me command, turning it into plain text. Even then, the box remains invisible to me. In
this image, the presence of an invisible box allowed me to enter "/looking" since it was treated as text instead of an unrecognized command.
If I retype a message that had the box, then the box does not appear. If, however, I enter that
same message in again (such as by pressing the up arrow key), the box does appear. The box cannot be copied and pasted. Again, efforts to identify a certain key press or pattern behind the boxes have failed.
I'm using mIRC v.6.31. Any ideas what could be causing this bizarre phenomenon?
