RedAlert, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. "Since routers don't understand IRC or even TCP..." DUH. Anyone in the area of networking would be laughing at this nonsense (referring to the part of TCP, not IRC). This immediately invalidates anything you have to say in this subject matter. Coupled that with "Btw, there is no such thing as the "half-open" sockets you described earlier.", you're nothing short of very ignorant on this subject. If you showed that you had any knowledge of the subject you're talking about, I might dignify your post with an actual response. But for the original poster, the conclusion should still be the same, it's very unlikely for it to be mIRC's fault in any way.
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As a side note, I did not use the term "half-open" (in references to sockets) in strict regard to it's technical definition of a state in which a socket has not yet received an ACK for it's SYN (and the term does exist, contrary to what you say). I was using it in reference to mIRC not being constantly aware of the state of the connection to the IRC server, because it's not constantly being validated; I can be on IRC, completely unplug the power to my router for 30 seconds, have it retrain, then go on chatting on the IRC server as if nothing to my connection had happened (unless something requiring a validation, such as a ping, occurred within that time frame which could not be responded to); I've done this multiple times. This is contrary to a connection that is constantly validated such as when playing a game.
