A friend of mine in China has downloaded and installed mirc on a computer running windows me. She has a connection to the internet via a gateway at the school where she is teaching. When she tries to connect to an irc server (any server, doesn't matter which), she gets the following error:

send error 10057 Socket is not connected

Can anyone shed any light on this?

you can find brief description of that error at http://support.ipswitch.com/kb/WSK-19980714-EM20.htm
A socket is essentially a connection.

What could be happening is the school is blocking the ports needed by mIRC to connect to a server (6660-6669, 7000-7001, 113), many dont allow IRC access.

i've looked into this a bit and i'm not sure that it is a port blocking problem. i have some modest admin skills, so here is what i did: i installed an irc server on a machine in my home net (which accesses the net via a gateway/firewall). i configured my gateway firewall to port forward to the machine running ircd, then ran a snooper (on the gateway) to watch activity on the port being presented to the world. at first i forwarded 6667 straight through, then tried 443 (https) -> 6667, then tried 80 (http) -> 6667. of course, i had my friend do the same configuration in mirc. the result was, that never was there a single attempt to attach to my gateway. (i also tested all this by using mirc on an outside computer - have two internet legs here.) my friend can always access http and https with a web browser, so those ports cannot possibly be blocked. shouldn't this mean that she should be able to at least connect to the http/https ports on my gateway? is there any possibility that mirc isn't handling some situation that is occurring on her computer?

further to yesterday's testing, we did some more today as follows: first i exposed a web server to the world (forwarded from my firewall to an internal machine running the server). my friend in china could attach and view my web pages. then i forwarded port 6667 -> 80 so that it looked to the world like the web server was operating on port 6667. my friend could still attach with a web browser. mirc could not attach on either port 80 or 6667, but internet exporer could on both. so i can say conclusively that port 6667 is not blocked by the firewall at the school my friend is at.

i should add one more thing to clarify some of my suspicions: i'm a developer and have worked with winsock (wrote C++ interface that unifies socket access over unix and windows). i know that winsock is an horrific mess - nice idea, asynchronous socket event notification, however the implementation can only be described as "ad hoc." (about the worst insult i could think to level at a developer ) very few things work reliably, and retry logic is pretty dominant in any code that uses winsock. at one point i had to get some windows software working in kuala lumpur and spent most of my time tuning the winsock interface.
my point is, that maybe there is something about the internet in china (or in the specific locale concerned) that mirc isn't able to deal with at the winsock level? perhaps there is some configuration relating to this that i haven't found yet?

this is another site that gives a bit more info on that socket error: http://www.sockets.com/err_lst1.htm

what version of mIRC is your friend using? Has she tried connecting on the gateway machine? She has tried different servers/networks, connecting to both ip and domain? i'm going to try to find someone who knows tons more about sockets than i do to check this thread

thank you so much. it will mean a lot to my friend if we can get this going. my friend is using mirc 5.91, the same version i have - she just took a copy of my install package (unregistered). she doesn't have access to the gateway at the school. she has tried many of the servers listed in the install package, both as host.domain name and ip addresses. dns seems always to be working for her and she knows how to get the ip address from a host name.

hrm. just for grins, have her download 6.1 from www.mirc.com and install it and see what happens.

ok, will have her do that when she can. things take a bit of time, she being in china and me in north america - our schedules aren't exactly matched.
i would do the same (upgrade) right away, but i can't find my registration number and i'm just waiting for a reply about it (hopefully in the next few days).

Maybe it's me, but after upgrading you should not have to re-enter your registration info. I never did anyway, and mIRC always remembered me.

i would say her school is blocking ports for her to connect to IRC. there may be nothing anyone can do and if they do help u it could get her expelled from school.

i believe that my previous posts prove that the ports are not being blocked. (long-winded, i know, but i was trying to provide all the details.) in short, she was able to use internet explorer to connect to my firewall on port 6667. when she uses mirc, it doesn't work. if the school was blocking port 6667, internet explorer wouldn't be able to connect.

yes, you are right - i waited needlessly for my registration number but now i have it in case i get a new computer.

Not sure about it, but maybe the proxy is blocking IRC while letting the HTTP requests through ?

yes. this is something to look into. i don't entirely understand how proxies operate (only the broad concept) - my next bit of research...