Woooohoooo! This is about as good as it gets. This new version, with irc:// protocol handling, universal binary, and all-around improvements have solved all my problems. X-Chat Aqua is by far the best IRC client for MacOS X, and it's free! If I had any 'wouldn't it be nice' feature I'd like in a possible future version, it would be built-in support for the dccserver extension, as it is fairly common to run into, and quite tricky to run using CLI tools...