Help with parse_smileys and HTML entities

[eluser]dmorin[/eluser]
Not sure if I'm just being dense or what but I'm not seeing an easy solution to this (I have a feeling I"m just being dense)...

I store all user input in the database escaped using xss_clean and htmlentites. Then, when I echo out certain fields, I use the parse_smileys function to generate the image tags. The problem occurs when someone uses an htmlentity character directly before a closed parenthesis such as

("TEST")

which I then translate to

("TEST&quot

which the parse_smileys function then interprets the last two characters to be a wink.

It doesn't appear that these forums are affected by this, so can someone help me out? If I parse_smileys before converting to entities, it'll screw up the image tags and if I wait until after, I get smileys in the wrong places.

Thanks in advance!