Man, I haven't though of Grapevine in a long time.
Grapevine is failing to recognize your own joins to channels on Freenode:
<> You have joined channel .
This is happening because Freenode servers are sending an [arguably] malformed JOIN response to the client (server response in bold):
JOIN #abctest
:mynick!myuser@my.host.com JOIN #abctest
On EFnet, Abime.net, and others, the server response contains a colon before the channel name:
JOIN #abctest
:mynick!myuser@my.host.com JOIN :#abctest
Grapevine is expecting the colon and, because it isn't there, failing to parse the response.
RFC1459 isn't clear on whether this colon is required in this message, but
RFC2812 shows a sample response that does not contain it:
:WiZ!jto@tolsun.oulu.fi JOIN #Twilight_zone ; JOIN message from WiZ on channel #Twilight_zone
Your choices are to contact that author of Grapevine for a fix (ho ho), contact the developers of Freenode's ircd, or switch to another client.
