I agree with your Highlight suggestion, though there are so many options that really ought to be made channel/network specific... i think that a unified all-inclusive method should be considered for every option instead.
I also agree with making the Options dialog "non-model" (not-disabling the parent window) for the exact reasons you've mentioned. I know this change is possible, because I manually EnableWindow() the parent mIRC window with an external process for this reason. If you're interested, try this program
CopyText.
- Raccoon