I ended up coming up with a solution to this issue although its basically a hack. instead of setting the intent to point to an Activity class I'm using a Dialog class.
this.notificationIntent = new Intent(this, SomeDialog.class);
Now if the user selects the notification, via the logcat, I can see the Starting Activity logged, but it appears nothing happens.
This allows me to post a notification that stays while my app is running and then I just dismiss it when the user exits.
