The reason people have grown so attached to 6.03 is because another version of mIRC was not released for 1 year. People are point blank refusing to change to mIRC 6.12 despite the fact that there are very few interface changes except for a few moved features (apart from those life-changing "grips" of course *G*) - after 1/2 months, you'd get used to 6.12 aswell and would not like to revert back to 6.03. I hope this doesn't start another "6.03 is better than 6.12 war" heh.
The whole issue about releasing patches for 6.03 and below has been discussed until people's fingers have gone blue and carpal tunnel syndrome has become classed as epidemic. It's not going to happen because 6.12
is the patch, and if people don't use it, you are refusing the patch and putting yourself at an inconvenience.
That said, it is not impossible to protect yourself via scripts against the bug. There are various addons around on script websites such as
mircscripts.org. You can of course continue with the perhaps unsatisfactory
/ignore -dw * fix. If you're not happy with this, download the patch
here 
Happy chatting!
Regards,