I've had some intermittant issues when users put smileys into the subject line. It seems that when users put a smiley (or frowney, in particular - : ( ), there can be issues with the way the post is rendered both at the forum-level and the post-level.

Specifically, if the user has a long subject line and uses a smiley at the end, ActiveForums attempts to store the tag in the subject line and the line will be truncated at the subject length. The end result is a partial and unclosed tag, which yields all kinds of odd behavior.

Could you not perform Smiley parsing at the subject line for the product?