Thank you John and Chris both. I (eventually) got setTitle working by adding references to Shindig's util.js and gadgets.js to my containing page, and setting a "name" attribute on the gadget iframe tag.
Calling setRelayUrl and setAuthToken seems to make no difference, nor does changing the parentRelayUrl in container.js in Shindig. For now, I'm doing neither. I do have the newer version of rpc.js with the crazy symbols in it, and was using Firefox 3.5.2 and Chrome 2.0 to test in.
