Julian and I have been working on making CmdPeriod more flexible, as well as adding CmdPeriod/StartUp like objects for other events (shutdown, server boot/quit). (This was discussed in the Hague.) In the current draft (which we can forward to the list once a couple of things are sorted) the default stop stuff (clocks and servers-free) are moved into CmdPeriod, and can be disabled so that you can have your own behaviour.
Something similar could be done with StartUp, so you could disable or replace the platform specific stuff.
S.