Here's my two hundredths of a dollar... The fact of IRC is that all servers get clogged with people and therefore become slow or split. Splitting is where a server is so overloaded that it actually throws many of the users off as a kind of knee jerk reaction to "weight". So the neverending quest is to find a good strong server to use. I've found a one to use on the EFNet network called ionet.irc.com . Steven Rimlinger ("eggzakt" on IRC)