When working on profiling a WordPress install I found, to my surprice that for a 400 comment post the single most expensive thing was translating smilies to pictures — 55% of time to create the page!

Apart from sending a patch fixing this (which went into WordPress 2.8) I also made a small plugin to use before the new version was available.

It is no longer useful as everyone should be using a modern WordPress version.

It can be found here.