Thanks for your reply and other browsers may indeed fix the problem but I've tried Firefox and Chrome (though not for some time) but still preferred IE, probably because it easier to use what I'm used too, and IE hasn't caused any other problems that I've noticed.
I'm a member of other forums and the smileys have worked fine on those although they probably use different Forum software. The smiley issue isn't really that important enough for me to change browsers but I'll bear your advice in mind if do I find other issues. I forgot to mention that I can actually select smileys from the ones displayed it's just that they don't appear as a picture in my post, just text characters.
I do have another computer that's running Windows 7 with a later version of IE, maybe I'll try that to check if it behaves differently.
Regards
I