My b2evolution Version: 3.3.3 (Latest)

I'm having an issue where smiley rendering takes priority over unicode characters.

The situation in which I encounter it most often involves putting some Korean characters inside brackets. A small snippet from my blog will illustrate:

"...Graduate School of International Studies (GSIS) at Korea University (KU/고려대). I'm in the..."

That's how I intend the post to appear. The result however, looks like this (during both preview and publishing):

"...Graduate School of International Studies (GSIS) at Korea University (KU/고려&#45824http://forums.b2evolution.net/images/smilies/icon_wink.gif. I'm in the..."

So what seems to be happening is that the html for the unicode character 대 is being inserted as &# 45824; (space added between # and 4 to prevent phpBB from rendering the unicode), and then the smiley script runs and picks up the ; at the end of the unicode reference next to the ) following it, and inserts a smiley instead, breaking the unicode reference in the process. (It may or may not be worth noting that the unicode for 대 is actual #458240, and the 0 just seems to disappear altogether).

Now, certainly I could just change the wink trigger in the plugin settings, or turn off the plugin altogether to fix this particular issue, but I was hoping there was a less "workaround-ish" fix for this that avoids the issue entirely rather than having to change triggers continually as the issue crops up in different ways.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!