The standard client connects to irc.lfnet.org for discovery. Some ISPs disable IRC on the default port, it would be helpful to be able to set a different port in bitcoin.conf.
Is lfnet controlled by the dev team? If so, could more than 1 port be made available for connecting.
Don't bother with the IRC bootstrapping. Add -dnsseed to your startup arguments.
IRC bootstrapping is going to go away in future versions of bitcoin, so getting more people testing with dnsseed now would be good.