Now THAT is how you ask for help. Nicely detailed. So yeah with the 25 second delay I'd say you just can't connect to the server. You can check to see if Tor is trying to connect to it. onion icon -> Network Map Let your browser bundle sit idle for a few minutes so it isn't building circuits. Then try to connect in mIRC and you should see it building a lot of circuits (that fail). Then I'd say it is confirmed that your Tor is having trouble connecting to the hidden service (and mIRC is configured correctly).