Would it be possible, in the next version of mIRC to add support for eastern langauge packs to be used...

mIRC already supports Eastern languages. In order to use Eastern encodings, however, you have to turn Unicode support off and run mIRC in a locale appropriate to that country, either by changing your system settings or using Microsoft's AppLocale utility. There's also a special conversion mode for the Japanese ISO-2022-JP encoding, called SJIS/JIS conversion. This will often be a necessary step, since Unicode hasn't really caught on in Asia yet.

Good luck, whatever you decide to do.

you also need a valid font for displaying asian text so make sure you have one (which I think you do, but hey, never hurts to mention)

it took me a long time to get mIRC working with japanese...

I didn't think of that actually. Thanks

Er, no you don't - you just select an appropriate font (MS Gothic for Japanese, MingLiu for Chinese BIG5, SimSun for Chinese GB2312, etc.), select the appropriate character set (as mentioned previously), then set UTF-8 to "Display only". The only time you ever need to change the system locale (either globally or using AppLocale) is if you are running Windows 9x/ME - for NT/2000/XP, you just need to install support for the language once (to get the fonts and the codepage conversion tables) and you're good to go.

Why, thank you, Quietust! This is a merciful court.