Additonal resources:

• http://blogs.perl.org (though I think you'll get more responses here.)
• http://superuser.com
• http://identi.ca (twitter for geeks and people who mostly hate twitter :-) Has a lot of user groups including a few for IRC/chat clients. I generally get pretty quick answers there.)

Just a wild guess but maybe in trying different clients you possibly didn't end one of your sessions? As others have mentioned I also have not have had problems connecting to irc.perl.org using either Colloquy or Adium.