"Automatically connect to network" and "Automatically join channels" features, 
inherited from xchat core, are, IMHO, not really easy to use with the current 
UI.

Let's take a sample use case:
We have user "A", happy gnome user who have asked to remain anonymous. He is 
willing to contribute back to the gnome project and by chance hear of the 
Bugsquad team. So he fire up xchat-gnome and connect to their channel 
#bugs@GIMPNet. There he find a lot of friendlies peoples, Luis hugging him, 
etc... so he decide to always come back.
*end of introduction*
To do so, he will have to : 
1/ Open the edit menu
2/ select preferences to open the Preference dialog
3/ select the Network "sheet"
4/ Browse thought the list to find GIMPNet
5/ click on edit
6/ check "Automatically connect to network"
7/ select the "user and channels tabs"
8/ Add the #bugs channel.
9/ Close the two opened dialogs
User "A" find that a little to complex for such a simple task. We could 
probably simplify his life a bit right?
*end of use case*

You must certainly have already noticed but if a user want to automatically 
rejoin a channel/server next time, odds are high that he is already on them.

So my proposal is too add a check box in the channel's and server's menus (and 
the correspondings popups menus) which the user can check to automatically 
join/connect.
If you find that a little to intrusive, you could also just add a simple 
option in the network menu to show the "Network Properties" dialog.

Another idea of mine, breaking a little more the current UI, but which in my
senses is more 
in GNOME spirit, will be to throw away all this auto connect stuff from the UI and 
use the idea of gnome session :  Have an option to automatically reconnect to
all the opened channels next time xchat-gnome is launched.

What do you think of these proposals?
Staz.
note : Please, forgive my bad english :/
note2 : I suspect bugzilla is probably not the best place to have such
discussion but the project lack a mailing-list.