If the user sets mirc.ini [ssl] load=2, this prevents mIRC from checking for newer external OpenSSL libraries and resolves the issue.
The next version of mIRC will be changed so that, by default, it will not check for newer external OpenSSL libraries.
Could you please tell us what exactly does load=0 and load=1 do? I tested this and both values seem to load the external OpenSSL libraries, but I'm unsure which one to use, 0 or 1, to be able to keep using external OpenSSL libraries.
