Thanks for all of the great advice and I'm definitely going to see if I can the LED situation improved through cron.

But I was thinking what might possibly be an even better solution would be turn dim the LED based on the light sensor. So the darker it is the dimmer the LED gets. Because the LED tends to fade in and out at times I assume that it's able to be dimmed.

I'm a web developer so I don't have a lot of experience in programming at this level or in most of the languages typically used in Maemo. But if somebody can point me in the right direction I'd be happy to attempt to write something to do this sort of thing. Right now it's looking like I'll have to do my homework on DBUS and maybe Python. I'm comfortable with C# so maybe Vala would be better for me than Python?