focus stealing prevention has been re-enabled in CVS HEAD for metacity.  This
means that applications need to set their _NET_WM_USER_TIME for any windows that
are to be mapped.  startup-notification launchers combined with gtk+ handle
almost all cases, but it can't handle cases like a gnome-terminal instance that
asks a previously running instance to open a window instead of opening one
itself.  To handle that, gnome-terminal must have the new instance forward the
DESKTOP_STARTUP_ID to the already running instance (which it already does), and
have the already running instance parse the timestamp from the startup id and
set the _NET_WM_USER_TIME of the window it opens to that value.

I will attach a patch momentarily that does this.  The patch won't actually
work, however, until the startup-notification module is patched to provide the
new functions used in this patch (see bug 151245).