Did you try irc.stealth.net as well? I found a very old list (1994) that also includes servers in various states of the USA, you can find it here:
http://www.cul.net/ircservers.html
However, IRC servers sometimes tend to vanish or change names, so some of them will probably not work anymore.
Oh, and what I forgot: there used to be metaservers, try us.ircnet.org, maybe that will work. mIRC also has a list of IRC servers.
I cannot connect to any of these, but that might be because German hostmasks are completely banned by default. (there used to be messages for that but eventually they completely deny TCP/IP connections now)
Till
Edited by tigloo on 03/08/01 06:52 PM.