TinyMCE editors in meta boxes, not saving P tag

for all the hell that the autop function seems to give me when I don’t want it, I have several custom meta boxes with tinyMCE textareas. and now they aren’t saving

tags.. they seem to be ok w/ saving other html markup.

my html for one of my boxes looks like:

<div class="customEditor">
    <div class="custom_upload_buttons" class="hide-if-no-js"><?php do_action( 'media_buttons' ); ?></div>
    <?php $mb->the_field('below_content'); ?>
    <textarea rows="10" cols="50" name="<?php $mb->the_name(); ?>" rows="3"><?php $mb->the_value(); ?></textarea>
</div>

the naming and stuff is all handled by WPAlchemy, hence the weird $mb->the_name() stuff

function
my_admin_print_footer_scripts() { ?>

/*

/* * Multiple TinyMCE Settings */
settings = {
mode:”specific_textareas”,
width:”100%”, theme:”advanced”,
skin:”wp_theme”,
theme_advanced_buttons1:”bold,italic,strikethrough,underline,|,bullist,numlist,blockquote,|,justifyleft,justifycenter,justifyright,|,link,unlink,|,spellchecker”,
theme_advanced_buttons2:”formatselect,XXXforecolor,|,pastetext,pasteword,removeformat,|,outdent,indent,|,undo,redo,|,code”,
theme_advanced_buttons3:””,
theme_advanced_buttons4:””,
language:”en”,
spellchecker_languages:”+English=en,Danish=da,Dutch=nl,Finnish=fi,French=fr,German=de,Italian=it,Polish=pl,Portuguese=pt,Spanish=es,Swedish=sv”,
theme_advanced_toolbar_location:”top”,
theme_advanced_toolbar_align:”left”,
theme_advanced_statusbar_location:”bottom”, theme_advanced_resizing:”1″,
theme_advanced_resize_horizontal:””,
dialog_type:”modal”,
relative_urls:””,
remove_script_host:””,
convert_urls:””,
apply_source_formatting:””,
remove_linebreaks:”1″,
gecko_spellcheck:”1″,
entities:”38,amp,60,lt,62,gt”,
accessibility_focus:”1″,
tabfocus_elements:”major-publishing-actions”,
media_strict:””,
paste_remove_styles:”1″,
paste_remove_spans:”1″,
paste_strip_class_attributes:”all”,
wpeditimage_disable_captions:””,
plugins:”safari,inlinepopups,spellchecker,paste,wordpress,tabfocus”
};

  jQuery(document).ready(function($) {


          var $ta, id, mceID;


          $('.customEditor textarea').each(function(i){
              $ta = $(this);
              id = $ta.attr('id');

              if (!id){
                  id = 'customEditor-' + i;
                  $ta.attr('id',id);
              }
              tinyMCE.settings = settings;
              tinyMCE.execCommand('mceAddControl',

false, id);
});

          $('.custom_upload_buttons a').each(function() {
              $(this).click(function() {
                  mceID = $(this).parent().next('textarea').attr('id');
                  window.send_to_editor = window.send_to_editor_clone;
              });

              window.send_to_editor_clone = function(html){
                  tinyMCE.execInstanceCommand(mceID, 'mceInsertContent', false, html);
                  tb_remove();
              }
          });




      });     /* ]]> */</script><?php }

// important: note the priority of 99,
the js needs to be placed after
tinymce loads
add_action(‘admin_print_footer_scripts’,’my_admin_print_footer_scripts’,99);