It has nothing to do with your version of MSN, it’s just the emoticon key. You can turn off emoticons completely on your end in the Options area. However the (t) will still show up as a phone to your contact. The only way around this is to use alternative brackets suchs as {t} or [t]. I don’t see how this could come up in conversation often anyway, unless I’m misunderstanding the problem – Does it happen only where “(T) = 
” or on things like “(this) = his” as well?