There seems to be an issue with backslashes and single quotes. The cry smiley doesn't work even in the demo chat.
In the theme.txt file of MSN theme the cry smiley is defined as this:
:'(
However, in the chat the tooltip of the smiley icon says that is is actually this:
:'(
It looks like it is trying to escape the single quote. However, when you click the icon, this text appears:
:'(
No smiley icon. I made a quick hack and added :'( to theme.txt, and now the button works, but the tooltip now says :\'( , which looks quite silly.
I don't think it should be necessary for the user to escape special characters to use them. Actually it sounds like a potential security risk.