Can I hide a program from ongoing activities in the notification bar? Is there a way to hide the notifications that a given application shows in the Ongoing Notification bar?
As of Android 2.0, the system requires that apps that run constantly in the background, and that require a certain level of priority so that they don't get killed offhand (like music apps), put an Ongoing Notification. This was to prevent abuse of requesting this level of priority without letting the user know that it's occurring.

You can read about this here:
http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Service.html#startForeground(int, android.app.Notification)