As it turns out, its not me being stupid, apparently it's running tooltip under wine leading to being stupid. JPG was kind enough to help me a bit today, and we found that, although I can save any other formats, the bblx format does not bring up any save dialog. I even tried opening an existing properly formated bblx file, and then added a space to the text and went to re-save it, and nada, no pop-up to ask me to save the file.
Maybe this should go in its own thread, assuming there are any other linux/wine users who may be able to help solve this problem?
One other problem I found, when I tried to open an existing *.bblx file from tooltip, it was not seeing any of the files using the *.bblx mask in the file browsing menu, but I could use the exact filename to open it that way.
I've already checked the winehq app db to see if any work-arounds had been posted, but there's not a whole lot useful info there.