Aha, Tom I'm guessing that you're cutting and pasting the response having pre-prepared it in a word processor such as word?
The Difficulty is that these programs use invisible format marks to lay out the page properly, so when they're copied across to the 'Plain text' editor used on the forum it treats all these marks as just more characters.
As the marks can be the same as the shortcuts used for entering smilies here ( ':' & ')' =
etc.) the software then thinks you're flooding it with smilies.
(Hope that makes some sense.)
If it's word being used then I know that the document can be 'saved as' a plain text page which will then (hopefully) just slot right in.
It can be a real pain... as many of us must know.
The format marks can be pre-edited by pasting the text into 'notepad' on Windows, which uses the same plain text format as here. If that seems like a lot of bother (quite tedious sometimes) then if you email the original document to me I'm happy to excise them manually and return a 'postable' version to you.
Cheers,
Adam.