Yes, timers may work, but it's a really nasty hack, and one we shouldn't have to use.
The ability to detect a mouse click within the nicklist would be absolutely wonderful.
Or you could go out and code your own nicklist with DLL's, and so forth, but again, this is a nasty hack, and one we shouldn't have to resort too.
Being able to use a mouse event in nicklist would be tweriific!
As would being able to dock dialog boxes to parts of the mIRC interface (*cough* the nicklist *cough*). Then we could go about creating some rather nifty channel managers without having to bugger around with dll's, or other means.