I am not sure if I have ever commented on the emoticon issue in the past, so I will just quickly chip in: I am not a great fan of graphical emoticons myself :-) however many people obviously enjoy using them. Emoticons have not been added to mIRC mainly because there are so many feature requests on my to-do list ahead of them. I am not sure how much work it would take to add them since I have not looked into it yet but once the Unicode version of mIRC is released (a huge and complex project that I have been working on over the last year), I plan on implementing changes to the interface - and support for graphical emoticons will be a part of that. And yes, they will be optional :-)
