Thp wrote both GPodder, and Panucci. He just choose to seperate the functionality since he didn't seem to want to include the player with the Podcast manager.

Your welcome to write your own Podcast management application with integrated player. =P. Not sure if GPodder's code is open source but you could always fork it and do it yourself.

Anyway, I'm not sure if this is my device only. But Gpodder seems to stay in the memory for sometime after I close it. Usually happens after I play some podcasts in Panucci. Any idea of what log I could send you thp? It eats around 10% CPU usage so I wind up having to kill the process.