Is there any way to simply disable all the emoticons, smiley faces, bananas, stars and hearts and just enable the ''basic emoticon'' package, just the 20 basic ones.

I find some of the other icons distracting and ugly when people simply type ''lol'' and some other expressions.

This can be done by running a different emoticon pack, or by editing the existing one and installing it as a separate pack (so an update won't overwrite the changes).