I almost wonder if the OP has mIRC installed multiple times and is running it from a desktop shortcut that points to a different copy of mIRC that doesn't have mIRC.ini in the folder. Like you said, DJ_Sol, if mIRC.ini were in the same folder as the mIRC.exe that is being run and you're not using a shortcut that specifies a location for the mIRC.ini file that you want to use, it will have the active folder as the same as mIRC.exe.