Good to see you back, Mark. Check the bottom of this thread. Kim Covil wrote a patch a while back that I'm pretty sure does what you want. Basically you add an "exec=" line to your config.ini and it fires the apps up when Hijack loads config.ini. The next step is, I guess, to add menu item(s) to Hijack for each of the user's installed apps which, when selected, would call the hijack_exec() function that Kim's patch provides.

I tried to do this myself, but I get a kernel panic when selecting apps. You will undoubtedly have more success, I'm sure.

Anyway, the patch itself is here.

And if you're looking for other things to do in Hijack, the thread linked above has some of the big ones people have been asking for in your absence.

Also, the audio overlay stuff has improved to the point where I think we should think about making it part of Hijack. I have it delaying allocation of the buffers until the first overlay audio write. You may wish to double-check my work since I'm an amaterur when it comes to the kernel. Earlier issues with volume spikes have been fixed, too. Anyway, here's the patch.