I think you're confusing Glob Matching with Regular Expressions.
Most things use globing patterns, especially when dealing with file names... as in *.* (star-dot-star), with wildcard characters of '*', '?', and sometimes '&'.
* = Any Character of Any Quantity, 0 or more.
? = Any Single Character, just 1, no more no less.
& = Any String of characters except Space/Tab/Null/Newline, eg, Any Word. I rarely see this wildcard implimented.
This is the default pattern matching mIRC uses.
Regular expressions on the other hand use '*' and '?' as Quantifiers, which may be what is confusing you. '*' works much like the Glob Star -- Any Quantity... while '?' works similar to the Glob Question-mark -- One or Zero Quantity.
Glob * == Regex .*
Glob ? == Regex .
Note that '.' means Any (single) Character in Regular Expressions, so '.*' means Any Character Any Quantity.
Hope this helps.
- Raccoon