Hello everybody! I'm kind of a newbie at mIRC, but I have made a few observations, and possibly have a solution:

I recently installed mIRC 6.14 and had not at that point had any preious version installed. I soon started notising the 10053 error and it didn't just affect mIRC, but as DC+ and my FTP client. So I uninstalled mIRC and everything went back to normal. No errors and no dropouts. I figured it had to be some kind of error during the installation so I tried again. And what do you know? The error returned... I then tried updating, and tweaking everyhing on my computer (drivers, windows, network settings etc), but norhing helped. I uninstalled again and gave it up for a while, but then I got thinking that maybe it wasn't a bug in my windows (XP by the way) but in mIRC, so I thought of trying a older version (5.81) and everything worked! No error ever! Later I tried formatting my harddrive and installing a clean windows and then version 6.14 again, but the error re-appeared. With 5.81 it works just fine.

And here at last comes my point: Most likely, in this case, it IS a bug in mIRC that causes this problem, but since people have comletely different setups of their network/internet access, it doesn't always show up, or it shows up in completely different ways. This has to be one of the hardest bugs to crack, ever!
I have seen this bug earlier in different prorams/enviroments and it has usually been related to one or more of the subjects mentioned earlier in this tread (and others), such as firewall settings, MTU, lease time of IP adresses etc., but this does not seem to be the case here. I'm not trying to place blame, just trying to suggest where to start looking for the problem.

My advice to all you out there with this problem is to try different versions og mIRC until you find one that works for you! wink