HOWTO start arbitrary apps on bootup
 

there's a lot of hacks to start processes on boottime, like adding a QueenBeecon button and set to execute-once.

The generic way however is to add
to the .desktop file of the app to start in /usr/share/applications/hildon.
This will start the app after hildon-desktop got initialized and all the background magic that's happening during boot releases the CPU. This might take some 2..3 minutes.

Tested with xchat, works just fine. After CPU got a few moments of spare time, xchat starts up and window goes on top.
(the X-Maemo-Prestarted-Priority is a sequence number. calendar got 3000, so I used 5000 to make xchat start after calendar background process)

[edit] I stopped using this for xchat, since there's no way to stop an app which got started this way, it always gets respawned. Alas X-Maemo-Prestarted= doesn't take any other meaningful arguments than "always"

/jOERG