Thanks for all the info. I figured their IRC server is probably a little misconfigured. My "Skip MOTD on connect" is unchecked, so their server must not be sending the code for "no MOTD". But it is interesting as others have pointed out that mIRC does not consider itself connected until something happens (good or bad) with the MOTD. I was trying to do an auto-join of a channel, but it doesn't work (without some serious tweaking anyway) because of the MOTD issues on this particular server.
