What will be the difference(s) from the Parachat from the user point of view? Will it have smilies, sounds, private rooms?

There are smilies, bbcode, sounds, but for private rooms... no, not yet. Theres not even an ignore button yet. But it should be in soon, I think... So far, the only options are "Kick User" and "Ban User" from chat.

Our Parachat Advanced doesn't even have kick and ban, we'd have to pay up for Pro to get that. However for our purposes it's fine as only staff are allowed to use it. For general member chat we have a free IRC flash applet.

The one feature the pricey version of Parachat has that we'd want is log keeping, which enables scrolling up to see what happened before you joined. On the other hand we kind of like it that there is no record whatever and we can feel what we say is totally shredded (unless someone copies the screen).