the regex isn't the issue here. some sort of styling issues I presume, i haven't confirmed it yet.

It's hard to even try to help you when you provide basically zero information.

What did you do? What did you expect to happen? What actually happened? What software are you using the editor in?

A detailed and complete description of your problem will help one of us possibly solve it for you.

So my issue was that mode needed to be switched to textareas.  Now I just need to figure out why anything using [*code*] tags disappear when I try to edit content using tinymce.

The bbcode plugin that comes with tinymce is written for the "punbb" board. To support other "dialects" (such as phpbb3, SMF, etc...) you have to change some of the regular expressions in the bbcode plugin.

I just want the rich text editor loaded on default, without having to click any links or anything.

Set yourself aside a LOT of time... then read here:

http://www.tinymce.com/wiki.php/%22For_Dummies%22

In the example, there is a link you click to toggle tinymce, well i took the code from that link and put it on the textarea tag, worked fine but i found a few issues that would be too much trouble to fix, so I just want the rich text editor loaded on default, without having to click any links or anything.

This is how tinymce is called:

<script type="text/javascript">
tinyMCE.init({
        theme : "advanced",
        mode : "none",
        plugins : "bbcode",
        theme_advanced_buttons1 : "bold,italic,underline,undo,redo,link,unlink,image,forecolor,removeformat,cleanup,code",
        theme_advanced_buttons2 : "",
        theme_advanced_buttons3 : "",
        theme_advanced_toolbar_location : "top",
        theme_advanced_toolbar_align : "left",
        theme_advanced_styles : "Code=codeStyle;Quote=quoteStyle",
        entity_encoding : "raw",
        add_unload_trigger : false,
        remove_linebreaks : false,
        inline_styles : true,
        convert_fonts_to_spans : false

});
</script>
<textarea name="post" id="content" style="width:100%;"></textarea>
<a href="#" onclick="tinyMCE.execCommand('mceToggleEditor',false,'content');">[Toggle WYSIWYG]</a>

Once again, I want to remove the link and have tinymce initiated automatically without having to call tinyMCE.exeCommand.