I upgraded to the latest stable ver of Kunena last night and lost the BBCode editor in the forum. After reading through the Kunena doc on the issue and testing Sporter and Kunena locally, it does look like there is an issue with the template js. The problem goes away when I switch back to the default Joomla template.
What sucks more is that on my live site , switching the template doesn't fix the issue. So, I guess there's an additional component conflicting besides the template.
This is all greek to me. If anyone can help with a suggestion I would be grateful.