Whenever I start this activity, it always starts bottomed out--scrolled all the way to the bottom. I am not doing anything weird in the activity OnCreate (or anywhere for th
Along with what devmiles.com said.
If you set the following property in your LinearLayout - android:focusableInTouchMode="true" your LinearLayout will be focused on start and your activity won't scroll to EditText in the bottom.
If you call requestLayout() on a view at the bottom of your linear layout it might steal the focus from your top most view. So just call requestFocus() on the top most view in the linear layout after calling requestLayout() on a lower view.