mIRC is quite easy to use, it has horrible amount of settings but it can be set to automatically auth you and connect to gamesurge and so on. There's bound to be plenty of tutorials around if you just google stuff. I use
Irssi myself, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone not familiar with commandline based stuff (vs. the normal graphical interface most clients and programs offer). Also, if you seriously have trouble connecting to a server, I'd be willing to bet that the problem is in NAT/Firewall settings and not in the client.