qwerty12, Is there somewhere where this modification is detailed for a linux newbie like me who has gone a pretty good way at executing step-by-step directions for the Tablet. (It seems stupid on Nokia's part not to include an out-of-the-factory setting where you can BOTH shut off the screen AND lock the keypad.) BTW, I've already done the change where I now see "reboot" and "soft poweroff" etc when I press the power button.

Also, do you know of a software button for opening the shutdown menu? I wish there were one. I hate it when I want to lock the keypad or reboot and I accidentally press the power button too hard and end up shutting down by accident.

What you've got is powerlaunch; that replaces mce, so Faheem's change (in mce.ini) will have no effect. Powerlaunch is controlled by ediiting the files in /etc/powerlaunch/, which is not for the faint of heart.

I actually used the mce.ini as a base for my changes. The file is well commented so I just made my changes in the night using vi >.<

I've attached my mce.ini. Either replace your existing one or look at it and make changes to your existing one as necessary.

You can also edit mce.ini so if you hold down the button long, it will show you the power off menu.

PowerKeyLongAction=poweroff to PowerKeyLongAction=menu would do that.

I've made these changes in the attached mce.ini I use on my N800 OS2008. The attachment is a tar file not a zip file. Remove the .zip extension and open. I had to include .zip to upload the file.

Double press puts you into softpower off. If you are charging the NiT and are in normal mode and connected or not connected to a AP, your wifi will
still stay online. If you are connected to AP; not charging, your wifi connection will stay online. If you are in normal mode but not connected to an AP, your Internet Tablet will go into offline mode.

When I press my doublepress, the display dims and keypad and and touchscreen disable. Then when you unlock the keypad, you must hold down the power button. You can hold it for as long as you want and it will not turn the NiT off. Doing that will reconnect your wifi if it was turned off, reenable the home button and allow the shortpress device menu to come up again. Blame Nokia's broken softpower off, not me :P

But if as Benson says, you have Powerlaunch, you don't need this. Powerlaunch fixes the softpoweroff.
I learnt that

re the comments about passwords: there are a number of password manager pkgs for maemo, including some that use modern respected enc algs, that ought to suffice if you want to put important data on there.

I'd like to find such a pkg that supports cmdline as well as GUI access, but haven't yet...

Bump.

I know what I enabled now. Grab the mce.ini from above and set true to this gconf value:
/system/osso/dsm/locks/touchscreen_keypad_autolock_enabled

So when you do softpower off, it will lock the keypad & touchscreen making softpower off usuable by 90% rather than 30%