Shoutbox

Plus! sends messages by adding text to the conversation window's textbox and simulating the enter key's press. This is how it sends custom emoticons.

If there is text in the box when it sends it, it copies it and pastes it back in after it's sent.

Because the auto-replaced emoticons are images, they come out as a space. This is normal.

However, when the user presses "send", messenger sends it all as text, and sends the images separately in what the protocol calls a "MSN Object".

This way, Plus! can see what the emoticon shortcuts are.

Answer to your question: It can't restore them because it just copy/pastes the text. Try this manually, the emoticons will be replaced with spaces. It can't get the shortcut text because the box contains images, and since it's not being sent, you can't do that.

An alternative to your problem, though not a very good one, is to log what the user types into a variable using the edit key pressed event. Then, use SendMessage, and after that's sent, set the edit text to the variable. This will set it to what plus sets it to, but since it checks it key-by-key (instead of copying it all at one time), the emoticon shortcuts will be preserved.