Does the SSH program (the one installed when you jailbreak 1.1.2 ipod touch/iphone) have any significant effect on the battery life?
I know one of the older versions did, but i'm not sure about this one.

I don't think SSH is an app, rather an enabled feature. That's what I think anyway.

It's a daemon/service that is installed, and listens in the background until needed.

If you are using OpenSSH it will be fine - it does not suck battery life.

http://blog.psmxy.org/pkg-info/openssh/

"Will this kill my battery?
No. Unlike other ssh packages for the iPhone, this package does not have a constantly running daemon. It is simply added to the list of connections that the inetd daemon (which always runs on your iPhone) listens for. If it sees you trying to connect, it will start up sshd to handle it. When you disconnect, the sshd process goes away. This is exactly how it runs on Apple laptops. So, no, this package will not kill your battery if left turned on because, in truth, there is nothing actually running. My package is the only one that can claim this, to the best of my knowledge."

This isn't open SSH that is installed from Installer, this is the one where you tick the box when jailbreaking the iphone. It creates an icon on the springboard.

Then no idea.

Why don't you remove it and install OpenSSH from Installer? It is much better.

Jailbreak (1.1.2 version) installs OpenSSH, you can see this by running the SSH program (which is also installed by the Jailbreak) as it says "OpenSSH" next to the on/off control.