Most versions of init that I've run into will notice that an entry has restarted over and over in a short time and just complain to the console that entry "xyz" is restarting too much and it won't restart it anymore until you change the inittab.

You see this a lot with flaky terminals (people still know what a terminal is, don't they?) where getty keeps croaking and init just gives up on it.

I think init is perfect solution for this problem if you have access to it.