It's funny to see that someone was mature enough to kindly tag this thread with the following: "bada rox, if u r too dumb, to use maemo"
Kids these days...

I tried the context menu behaviour quickly in File Manager, Conversations, fMMS, MicroB and Calendar. When you long-tap something and the menu appears, there are three alternatives:
1) if you release the "pointer" while it is on a menu item (highlighting it), the item gets selected.
2) if you drag the pointer outside the context menu and release it, the context menu disappears.
3) if you position and release the pointer on the very thin border of the context menu, without highlighting any of the items, the context menu will remain on the screen until you either select an item on the menu or tap outside it.

In all except MicroB, option 3) worked every time I tried it, but it does indeed take some accuracy to lift off the finger/stylus without moving the "pointer" from the thin menu border. I wonder how this behaviour could be tweaked?