This worked fine in 6.16...I have my connect retry set to 999 times and auto-reconnect on disconnection on. When I ping out and it reconnects me, I have it set not to use an alternate nick, but to retry until my ghosted nick pinged out instead, so it can reconnect me with it.
Since I upgraded to 6.17, it just stops retrying. It tries once, says nick is already in use, disconnects after waiting 30 secs, then doesnt retry anymore. Bug?