Yes, sven, you're right. But I don't see how that causes problems. I mean: you have ICQ and go on line. You see who's on line and your friends see you as well. When anyone wants to initiate a chat, he/she just have to do so, and anybody else can join. So I don't see any big difference, practically speaking, from IRC. Except, of course, with ICQ you and your friends must have authorized each other previously. Which may be annoying to many, but I find very important and useful.
Then, as far as the FW is concerned, both with IRC and ICQ you need to be able to receive and send on TCP/IP packets on some specific ports, na matter if you are in a client/server or a peer2peer situation, and that may be a problem depending on how the fw is configured. As a matter of fact, ICQ has a config panel that lets you chose WHICH tcp ports to use, and that made me solve all the connection problems, so far. I did not succeed with IRC, which I still can't use from my office. But again, it all depends on the fw settings... And of course, maybe I am doing something wrong on my IRC client cfg...

Taym
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MK II BLUE/RED 12GB #923