Are you on 3.5.2? I just noticed the smiley thing yesterday, and I upgraded yesterday morning. That doesn't necessarily mean they're connected, of course.
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"Trans Am Jesus" is "what hanged me"
Internet Explorer in various guises mangles animated gifs and truncates one pixel from the bottom and right hand side.
liv fixed the problem for some of the hoard by adding an extra blank pixel to those edges, but she doesn't like to do this as it sometimes stops the smilies from aligning properly with each other and/or the surrounding text.
FireFox never used to suffer from the problem - nor other browsers, as far as I know; it was an Internet-Exploder-only bug.