Because I didn't know about it
Honestly, I did do quite a bit of searching, and I seem to recall using terms as mentioned in a few links I've now found about xbindkeys, but nothing came up at the time.

Now I know about xbindkeys... works great, exactly what I was looking for, even before I thought about trying to modify the menu. Thank you again. It's in the repos, running xbindkeys -mk allows finding out key combinations, works great. Editing /home/user/.xbindkeysrc works great... now I just have to figure out how to get it to start on reboot.

The /etc/event.d startup file info I could find appears to be N900 specific. I've found a reference to autostart with the N810, but the file structure and commands are a little beyond my current pay grade.

For now, it's no big deal to run up a terminal session and start xbindkeys manually. I don't reboot that often. But, auto-starting an app is on the list of things to figure out so I suppose I'll make that my next challenge, along with those dbus commands to pass parameters to applications being started... Going to take a bit to wrap my head around that stuff too.

Oh, my /home/user/.xbindkeysrc looks like this:
"osso-xterm"
Shift + F4

Very simple. That's all it takes. I suppose I'll add more as ideas come to me. Thanks again for pointing out xbindkeys.

David...