Recovering Disconnected X Applications

[Adrien Guillon]

    Hello All,

    Sometimes I am in a position where it would be nice to recover 
applications which have been disconnected from the display. Let me explain:

    Imagine users connected through XDMCP to a GDM session. Their local 
X terminal crashes. Somehow, some applications may still running on the 
server. For instance, an openoffice application.  When the user is 
disconnected, I can still see (sometimes) their running applications. It 
would be very nice if I could do something like 'fg PID' to bring it 
forward to the new X session, and recover whatever they were working on. 
The DISPLAY number hasn't change, and it almost seems if I could sent a 
refresh signal I would recover the application (once the X terminal is 
back to life).

    Is it possible to recover such applications, or are they really 
dead, but still lingering? Is there any way to write such a utility, or 
does the X protocol by its nature forbid this type of recovery?

    Thanks,

    AJ Guillon