Kernel not recognizing your hardware? Problems with power management or PCMCIA? What hardware is compatible with Gentoo? See here. (Only for kernels supported by Gentoo.)
I do have an idea about why starting as a service causes a crash. When it does this, mmm3k is not able to acces information about the display. Trying to run xdpyinfo and xprop fails catastrophically. The X connection is refused by the server. It's just a mess. So, if anyone has ideas on getting around this, I would be appreciative.
The latest and greatest is now available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/mmm3k. Version 0.51. In order to get around the display permission issues, I split mmm3k up into two parts.
evmon runs as the monitoring daemon. the user space program, mmm3k takes the event info and does what's necessary. That way I can get around those issues.