This is more of a 'fun' type feature, but I would love to see support for animated emoticons (or animated gifs like www.deviantart.com has)

Emoticons have been suggested a number times and I don't see them ever being added, however, I don't know what the next version will bring. As an alternative, there are several DLLs available which allow you to add emoticons yourself.

Just regular ones would defeat the purpose of IRC being a general text based chat system. I know this is mIRC but a wide range of users use mIRC. I hope this never happens..

There is a typo in Rule 2. Oh wait, no there isn't, I just saw Rule 1. Nevermind.