Okay, I did the proper thing. I read the documentation, not just the API reference. I legally can't post anything here, but big brother background tasks are supported. You have to ask for them (an app can have more than one), they have to be granted, and there is a time limit returned with the grant. You also supply a handler that gets called upon either type of completion. But as NvyUs mentioned, you can declare your app as one of the special types, but the benefits seem only relevant to those functions.

Just more fancy lockdown. I'm done for now; back to interesting Maemo hacking.