solved it, here's how for any fellow novice developers whom it may help. the problem was i had some javascript that was loading random background images from a list of gifs. this code wasn't visually represented in the wysiwyg view of the site, and when i tried to make the code an editable region from the code view it wouldn't work (i'm just guessing but i think it was due to the fact that it was not a visible element). so i just made a visable region editable, went into the code view and copied the
<!-- TemplateBeginEditable name=" region name " -->
<!-- TemplateEndEditable -->
tags from that visable region and placed them around the non visable code in question. DW freaks out a little when you save the template, with a warining about tags being in a place it's not comfortable with, but there is no actual conflicts that i have experienced so far.