Oh, that's right. (Duh!)

Well, you could set a smaller theme there, too. (Actually, one thing I had thought of doing was getting the Debian apps using the Maemo themes... then it occurred to me that that'd NOT help the window-size issues, and I figured I'd not bother. Why I couldn't remember that just now is beyond me...)

Xnest is the only thing that comes to mind; you could run xnest with scrollbars (does xephyr do scrollbars, since it's already working?) and run matchbox, hildon-desktop, etc. all inside on :1, and no window manager on display :0... that'd be somewhat less overhead than the whole two-wm routine, but it's plainly suboptimal. (And hard to set up...)