Recent comments and smilies.

I’ve got Alex’s ‘wp-grins’ plugin and MtDew’s ‘recent comments’ plugin, and both are working well. I’m curious as to whether anyone has considered a method to make these two ‘play nice’ together.
For instance, if a user enters smilies in the comment, the recent-comments plugin displays them as the colon tag, i.e.
code 🙂 /code
It would be preferable to have the recent-comments filter these out entirely, and ignore them. Failing that, the recent-comments plugin could translate them to the appropriate HTML tag, ie:
code <img src=……./whatever.gif> /code
I imagine it would be more difficult (as well as fairly useless) to have the comments plugin translate them, as I don’t see any mechanism for one plugin to call the functions of another plugin.
I’m sure, though, that smarter and more creative minds than mine have explored these (and probably other) options. I’d appreciate any suggestions on a fix for this, one way or another.