Reminds me of a commercial project I did for my old University department around 1994. The GUI was ambitious and written in Motif, which was a little buggy and leaked memory. So... I ended up catching any SEGVs, saving state, and restarting the process, with a short message in a popup telling the user to wait. Obviously not guaranteed, but surprisingly it mostly worked. With benefit of experience & hindsight, I should have just (considerably) simplified it: I had user-configurable dialogs creating widgets on the fly etc, none of which was really required.