[kh99]

If you just want the quote to not appear when you reply to a pm, you can edit the template newpost_quote and remove the quote. But since the same template is used when replying to posts (and maybe other places like the blog), you'd probably want to put in a condition that checks for pms, like:

<vb:if condition="THIS_SCRIPT != 'private'">[QUOTE={vb:raw originalposter}]{vb:raw pagetext}[/QUOTE]</vb:if>

and just for the record, adding line breaks to that template (so that there's space between the top and the quote) does work, but I was wrong about using <br/> because the template is not html, it's bbcode. You can just use blank lines and it should work.