I guess you've noticed people haven't been beating down the door to reply to your question. It would be extremely difficult to have a nicklist that disagrees with your $ial. I would imagine mIRC wouldn't want to have people in your IAL that aren't in the nicklist, and could get confused by seeing impossible events. It looks like you want spaces in the 'real' nicklist, which might be impossible without replacing them with $chr(160)'s.
A substitute might be having a shadow channel. There's probably a way to change the width of the nicklist after the window is created, but I'm not seeing it offhand. You'd create the fake channel like:
//var %chan $chan(1) , %fakechan $+(@,%chan) | window -Ske2l9 %fakechan | titlebar %fakechan ( $+ $me $+ ) $+([,$nick(%chan,0),]) $+([,$chan(%chan).mode,],:) $chan(%chan).topic
Then you'd need to populate your nicklist like:
//var %chan $chan(1) , %fakechan $+(@,%chan) , %i 0 | while (%i < $nick(%chan,0)) { aline -l %fakechan $nick(%chan,%i) ( $+ $rand(1,9) $+ ) | inc %i }
You'd then have to do a theme shadow for all channel messages and events, including fixing the nicklist for JOIN|PART|QUIT|NICK events. Since the above example gives the fake window a titlebar similar to the real channel, you'd probably want to hide the real channel or give this fake window a different titlebar.
This is a script which alters display of most channel events. You'd need to alter several of these alterations to make it look more 'authentic', but you can use it as an aid in theming your fake channel.
