Over rated
I'd like to know what some of these apps are that seem to need killing.
Why aren't people getting on the developers of these apps instead of adding task killers?
I find ATM's presentation very confusing, with at least three places you can set things to be excluded and no indication other than some vague info in the help that explains this. As installed, its default violate its own recommendations and kills off things like gmail etc which will cause loss of notifications. You can tell ATM's interface has evolved, but was never designed. It needs a total rework.
Too many people assume that if an app does not shutdown immediately it is misbehaving. Some are designed to run a few seconds or minutes after shutdown, because the start up delay is long enough that an accidental closure is better handled by an idling component than a total restart.
The belief in task killers stems from a windows mentality, rather than a Linux one, and that is the crux of the problem here. I still believe joe user should not be micromanaging the phone. Virtually none of your Windows Knowledge is applicable to Android.
I've tried ATM for several days. I can't see any improvement in battery life, in fact, I think its worse. I'm at the verge of de-installing it, because I see little or no benefit.
Maybe my Nexus One just has less crap-ware installed because no carrier was involved. In any event, I'm not seeing any benefit to running ATM at this time, and when I find an app that does not shut down properly I de-install that app, and send email to the author, and find another app.