The problem is that I want folks to be able to create a technote (in a textread form) that contains any html tag, and save it exactly as typed, and then have them be able to edit that exact text again later, without some of those tag being interpreted as tags for the page instead of text in the textarea.

From the sound of it, someone is doing some unecessary entity unescaping when the form is submitted. If a user types

    <foo>
[download]

but what ends up saved is

    <foo>
[download]

then there's a problem in your form processing logic.