Comment 10 for bug 197673

Unfortunately, many cases where xrandr fails, it locks the system up, so we'd have no way to ensure that the restoration logic would always get called reliably.

But something similar could be done by e.g. moving the previous configuration to monitors.xml.old, and then have gnome-settings-daemon notice it and, if that file is older than monitors.xml by some amount (1 minute?), to move it back and restore the system. gnome-control-center could then be modified to display a dialog which would when Accept was pressed, would delete the monitors.xml.old. But this feels awfully hacky and flimsy to me; I'd worry it would cause more problems than it solved.