for the nth time today ichat went to town on my IM'ing someone a complex line of bash, placing smilies and other various sickening faces all over the line wherever I was using a paren adjacent to a variety of other things.

how do I stop it from doing that?

Have you tried View -> Messages -> Hide Smileys? It seems to do the trick on existing messages, at any rate.

silly me to look in the preferences for that...

thx