I wanted to save others the pain I had to make use of the Data Retentive feature of the nRF24LE1. The Data Retentive means that the first 512 bytes of the XDATA space are kept across the memory retentive sleep modes and enable keeping state between sleeps.
It appears that in order for this to work you need to build with --no-xinit-opt so that the initial code will not zero out the memory space. This also means you can no longer rely on the variables to have zero by default for the globals since there is nothing that will zero them out.