I've always hated iChat's insistence on replacing any smiley that it thinks it recognizes with a graphical version. There had been a script (iChat Smiley Remover) to get rid of them in previous versions, but it no longer works with the latest one.
However, it's still not too hard to remove them. In Terminal, do the following:
$ cd /Applications/iChat.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/
$ mv SmileyTable.plist SmileyTable.plist.bak
If your iChat is located in a different place, or you are using a language other than English, adapt accordingly. If, for some unknown reason, you actually want the smileys back, just substitute replace the second line above with mv SmileyTable.plist.bak SmileyTable.plist.
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