I have found myself sitting on a dead connection for upwards of 2 hours before. It's evidenced because I come back and type something after being away and then mIRC tells me I am disconnected.

mIRC should be able to know if a connection has been lost by the lack of any communications between client and server for X amount of seconds. This could be user settable and default to 300 seconds.

To alleviate any server-related retorts, I have control over the ircd.conf file and I can testify that the pingfreq is set at 90 seconds and the inactivity timeout is infinite (based on keep-alives, et al).

So in a nutshell: an occasional forced ping and client reconnect if needed.

Instead of checking connection activity, a better solution would be for mIRC to check the state of its sockets every X seconds, and immediatly show that the connection has closed as soon as it detects it.

Right now, I think mIRC does not check the connection states, and waits for a "clean" close from the server, or waits until it encounters an error with the socket before telling you it has been closed.

This way, if mIRC were to check socket states every X seconds, it would be able to tell you if you have been disconnected in a reasonable amount of time.

ok this is what normally happens every x amount of seconds the server pings you, the client. In a normal situation, mIRC notices this and pongs back. When you have pinged out, mIRC notices that it hasnt recieved a ping event and i think tries to ping the server itself (i might be wrong but im pretty sure) and waits on the server to pong. Remeber this is after like x amount of time of no activity on the connection. Aty this point if the server does not pong back, mIRC assumes you are disconnected and should disconnect. Why it didnt for you beats me. But the process seems to work fine on my end.

I am on 3 networks, the first one being undernet, and it rarely occurs. But I also connect on 2 others networks and I always get that same problem.

The trick I found was to create timers of 2 min on each connection with a command that doesn't exist in my scripts for example "antiidle". Because it doesn't exist in my scripts, mIRC tries to send it to the server and then realizes that the connection is no more and resets it.

But I can't tell why the first one is ok, while all subsequent connections have this same problem.

Anyways, that's my temp fix until someone finally pinpoints the problem or Khaled realizes that's it's a bug and fixes it or explains why this behavior is seen.

I've never had this problem, but I also don't visit a lot of different networks. I'm usually only on 2 (undernet and irchighway) and I have a very stable connection as well.