Instead I just programmatically selected the node which is checked
activeNode.select.defer(100, node);
and used...
var tree = Ext.getCmp("treePanel");
var selectedNode = tree.getSelectionModel().getSelectedNode();
..to read the name of the selected node.
If anyone knows how to miss out the second step and directly find the checked node, I´d be curious as to how it works.
yours,
Rob