May I impose on your code wizardry once more - how about a taskbar item. I'd like to replace Contacts with a shell program launcher or something similar.

Changing Statusbar to Taskbar (and adding an appropriate desktop file under the hildon-navigator directory, Type=python) makes it recognized in Panels, but no icon, and the taskbar shifts up. I didn't put a menu in (yet) so that might be the problem.