I tried to enter chat, and the applet opened up with no control buttons, so I couldn't send any messages. Any advice? I don't know a whole lot about this stuff.

Philorchites

You may need to download Sun Java client. There are some problems between Microsoft version and Sun's version of Java. If that fails you can always download Bersirc or mIRC.

Bersirc is an option on the archive site for Windows users and already setup to connect to the server.