OK, here you go.
Here is a sample project that replaces the tags with the proper animated smilie. The smilies are in gif files so you don't have to mess with resource files.
The project also demonstrates the hyperlink functionality we discussed earlier. this is because everytime you change TextRTF you have to reenable the EN_LINK effect for the hyperlinks. Since the animator messes with TextRTF, hyperlinks have to be updated too.
I'm sure there are some bugs and it can be cleaned up a bit but here it is.
Let me know how it works.