Sounds like you might need a lot of back/forth for your problem, might help to come to ##mirc on libera or efnet, or #mircscripting at swiftirc. if by 'preferences' you mean your Alt+E window doesn't have any servers, then something happened to servers.ini
Everyone just says libera, but the actual string for $network is Libera.Chat and it's unusual for networks to have a period in their $network string. Even mIRC itself needed an update back then to support the /server command using the groupname having a period instead of seeing it as a hostname
But yes, it helps greatly in mIRC for a variety if issues that you always connect to servers that are listed in your servers list, and even though it says the 'group' is optional, it's best that they match exactly what $network is there.
