John, instead of disabling smilies for the whole post being that &) or anything else can turn into a smilie, you should have a function to disable smilies, for example:

[nosmilie]
:)
[/nosmile]

or say for example:

<code>
[nosmilie]
code
[/nosmilie]
</code>

So that you could still use Smilies in a post without having to disable every smile in the whole post.

Wouldn't that be better? ...the wonderful things I think of ;].