If by "slight cheering up" you mean "a fine reason to jab a knife into your neck," then I agree. Why would an annoying, stupid, non-functional paperclip cheer me up? When I'm using MS Office, and that paperclip pops up for whatever reason, all it does is make me one step closer to installing OpenOffice. I love when I'm busy typing away in Word and it just decides to say "It looks like your typing a letter" and steals the keyboard focus so that nothing I type actually gets written. It makes me so happy to have to redo things for no good reason. I'm sure I'd just love it if the same thing could happen in an IRC conversation.
I can't speak for everyone, but if an OfficeAssistant type of thing ever appeared in mIRC, I'd be using a different client. Even if it were optional, disabled by default, required you to download a special plugin, and explicitely go through 5 confirmation scripts before it were activated, I'd still be gone. The OfficeAssistant is imho MS's biggest screwup, I wouldn't have any part in seeing it spread it's vile infection to other programs.
