I'm not able to reproduce this. The socket reply you get is weird (i.e. the "location: nnscript" thing - yet I cannot think of how nnscript could interfere with the setting of &a in the sockread event). Does the error always contain "content-length: 0"? Does www.whatismyip.com/automation/n09230945.asp produce the correct IP in your browser? What mIRC version do you use?