when you do a route in maemo mapper, it shows you the directions as a popup, that wants to stay on top of everything.

is there away to turn that off?

In the "Announce" tab of the Settings dialog, there is a preference called "Advance Notice" that controls that pop-up. Setting it to the minimum value should at least minimize the amount of time that the pop-up appears. I don't think there's a way to completely disable it; if not, I'll add a way to disable it in the next version.