You could have the program check to see if another copy is already running, and if not, run a second copy. Also so that the programs won't argue over who should be doing the work, pass a command line parameter that says "I was copened by another copy of this program", and set a boolean variable of the same name to true. Then if that boolean variable is set, have that copy of the program do nothing but check to see if another copy of the program needs to be loaded. If another copy does need to be loaded, load it with that same command line parameter, and set your own boolean variable to false, so you know to start doing the main load of work in place of the copy the user just shut down that you had to replace.