The main problem with that thread is it has around a hundred solutions to a hundred problems who's only similarity is a 5 digit number.
I have the same problem as fxchain. I'm running vista and am on a netgear router, I believe it's this
model I know the problem has nothing to do with my laptop, as I can run mIRC on just about any other connection than mine.
I've tried port forwarding with a static ip, it worked for about a day. Also when I got back from leave, it worked for a couple days after being shut down for 2 weeks.
The problem also affects all other IRC programs that I've tried.
I also noticed that I get the following message when I first try to connect:
irc.freenode.net- *** Looking up your hostname
irc.freenode.net- *** Checking Ident
irc.freenode.net- *** Couldn't look up your hostname
irc.freenode.net- *** No Identd (auth) response
I'm not sure what it normally says, but I'm pretty sure that's not it.