There right now, wanted to use an IRC Java client to get advice but Java's either not installed or disabled, and of course options and downloads and right clicking (:() are disabled. Help?

Getting past enough safeguards to Java might be the long, problem-causing way around.

Do the computers there have Flash installed? Flash tends to be innocent enough to get installed and destructive enough to connect to an IRC network. If there aren't any decent Flash clients, you might want to try the client at http://www.mibbit.com/ - I've chatted with the developer a few times and he's intent on supporting pretty much everything you'd find in an IRC client, so if that isn't blocked by your school filters then it's definitely worth a shot.

Awesome, I will give it a shot after easter.

Also, even on heavily restricted networks, port 443 (https) is often left open for outgoing connections. I wonder if having one of the irc servers accept SSL connections on 443 would be good enough to fool them (I don't think it would be easy to distinguish SSL IRC from SSL HTTP).

Okay, interesting but I would appreciate that to be put more in layman's terms if at all possible, so I can implement it.

Also, can't seem to find any good flash clients, and I am having trouble figuring out how to get to Arloria using mibbit, it lists only the main servers, and the /server command avails me nothing.

So, I found the join function but am getting ping timeouts; will make more attempts. Also, the Edit function is broken.