GNOME session management and crash recovery

[Tom Metro]

GNOME 2.28.1 has the ability to remember what applications you have
running when you shut down the system in a controlled fashion, or
remember them at the time you click the "Remember Currently Running
Applications" button on the "Startup Application Preferences" applet.

But it appears to make no attempt to periodically save the application
state (or technically, send the message to the running applications to
ask them to save their state), which would be desirable for the purpose
of recovering from a crash.

Has anyone hacked GNOME with an external cron job or some such to
periodically save the state? The 'gnome-session-save' command would make
this trivial to implement, but it is broken in 2.28.1.

Do newer versions of GNOME handle crash recovery better?

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/