This is fantastic, works 100%
I like a few others though didn\'t like the way you had to use HUGE font for the smiley\'s to show up well, However there is a very simple work around for anyone who wants to do this .....
All you have to do is edit the font you use and make the width and length of the : symbol a bit larger.
The smiley image will only be as big as the width and length of the letters you are typing out, for example :) < the smiley cant be any bigger than the width of that typed emotion in that font size, but by making the font wider and taller on : you give the smiley image more room.

I didn\'t use the bmp\'s used for this method I used my own smiles each one having there own bmp file ... smile.bmp sad.bmp etc
Each image was 15*15 in size ( standard for most java chat smiley\'s and forum smiley\'s ) and I then changed the replacements txt life like this-

(\:-?\)|?\))#smile.bmp#0#0#15#15 :-)
(\:-?\(|?\()#sad.bmp#0#0#15#15 :-(
(?i)(\:-?S)#roll.bmp#0#0#15#15 :-S

and this is the result in a screen shot - http://www.ineffectradio.com/alex/imgmirc.jpg

The only thing this does mean that because you have edited the : symbol (colon) your time stamp or web links will look a bit bigger -
http: //www.google.com like that , but you don\'t need to go over the top on making it bigger and it doesn\'t really show much.

I hope that\'s of some use to someone :)