Hi James,
I have been trying to connect to #winehackers from my Mac using Conversation. However, this is not working as I am not receiving the welcome screen from irc.freenode.net.
There's possibly some issue with Freenode, as is not uncommon. Have you tried connecting to any particular Freenode server manually? I seem to be on "lindbohm.freenode.net", and it's working fine.
Cheers, -- Owen Rudge http://www.owenrudge.net/
