You read proxy setting and use it whether it's enabled or not ? Heh, ugly but I like it. I'll probably use that. I'm not sure about the pain with wifi though. I spend most of my time on an ssh session, so dropping connection is a pain. How would I know if I needed to do so? I assumed notification of an MMS is after the attachment had arrived.

As for alternate route add -net ... connections, well bluetooth pan and usbnet connections that I create are done by hand and the system doesn't seem to know about them in the notification window at all, it seems to work cleanly without anything knowing.

It's interesting how the tethering works with a natd process rather than kernel nat and routing, it's more like the old "slirp" tool providing slip/ppp interface at non-root user level. My e90 and n97 would let me tether and at the same time connect _again_ via 3G from the phone, I'd ssh in to a box and last -3 would show different IPs! The connected data symbol on the phone had lines through it showing multiple connections. Some UK providers barred this ability. I doubt we'll see this on Maemo and who would use it?

Multiple default routes at the same time like S60 permitted is unlikely to ever arrive, although the newer Linux ip command can handle the fancy new multiple routing tables the kernel supports. You may be able to configure which applications connect out of which route. Scary. I'd stick with a -host route add for the gprs0 p-t-p end point using the proxy. It's doable in sh so python should be as trivial.