This seems to work for me and it doesn't affect signature pics (that I know of). Also, it applies to everything inside IMG tags even small images but luckily they don't resize to the default width, they just show their actual dimensions and if you click on them they still show inside the highslide box but just don't resize.
This is a plugin I was told to put inside the postbit_display_complete hook. And it also uses phpThumbs which is where the image resizing comes into play. It resizes on the fly server-side. You can edit it out if you want or you can download phpThumbs and install it to compliment highslide.
PHP Code:
$post['message'] = preg_replace('/<img src="([^"]*)" border="0" alt="" \/>/', '<a href="\\1" target="_blank" class="highslide" onclick="return hs.expand(this, { dimmingOpacity: 0.7 })"><img src="phpThumb.php?src=\\1&w=400" border="0" alt="" /></a>', $post['message']);