As MPdreamz suggested, the only real way to solve this problem is to break the fingers of whoever decided to put unescaped html tags within the parameters of another html tag. The problem lies with the fact that the html on a site usually comes back as lines that are too long for mIRC to handle internally. If a set of ' ' quotes (as in your example) fell across a linebreak, any code would be rendered useless.
One possible solution would be to remove any text that is enclosed in ' ' quotes in one regex, and then deal with the remaining < > brackets in another regex. But then the potential problem pops up when the ' ' quotes show up outside the < > brackets (in plain text), or when a single ' quote shows up within a set of " " quotes (and another ' quote isn't there to match it).
It seems that this rather simple request has turned into a very complex coding problem. I will try to think about it further.
-genius_at_work
