Hi aeroguy! Welcome to DaniWeb. While we can help you with a lot of the simpler things, you might be better off going straight to vbulletin.com for assistance. Basically, if you go into the vBulletin Admin Control Panel, there should be a heading in the left frame entitled Smilies. You can edit the location of Smilies on the server hdd via the Smilie Manager.

Use the Style Manager and click on the Edit Templates in the drop down menu next to the style you are using. There should be an option to revert templates which you've edited back to their default.

To change what happens when you click on a thread title, you'll want to edit the threadbit template.

Replace
[html] <if condition="$show['gotonewpost']">
<strong><a href="showthread.php?$session[sessionurl]t=$thread[threadid]$thread[highlight]" id="thread_title_$thread[realthreadid]">$thread[threadtitle]</a></strong>
<else />
<a href="showthread.php?$session[sessionurl]t=$thread[threadid]$thread[highlight]" id="thread_title_$thread[realthreadid]">$thread[threadtitle]</a>
</if>[/html]
with
[html]
<a href="showthread.php?$session[sessionurl]t=$thread[threadid]$thread[highlight]" id="thread_title_$thread[realthreadid]">$thread[threadtitle]</a>
[/html]