regexp hell

[B. T. Raven]

I am trying to byte-compile my .emacs for the first time and I see the
complaint "replace-string is to be used interactively..." or something.
I am using the form:

  (replace-string "\\" "\\\\" nil (point-min) (point-max))

in a function and it seems to work but I can't make any equivalent re's
work in re-search-forward (the suggested equivalent  to be used in a
lisp programm). I can't get past the "trailing backslash" error. Is
there something kosher for the above replace-string form?

Thanks,

Ed