A method and apparatus for executing target application programs with employment of a supervisor that is coupled to the executing target application through a conventional status reporting port of the computer. Events that represent execution errors or unexpected behavior are provided to the reporting port, or discovered through the reporting port, and the supervisor responds to such events by perusing a configuration that is tailored to the executing target application. For each reported event, the supervisor retrieves one or more actions that the configuration file specifies for the reported events and executes the specified actions. The configuration file includes actions that aim to effect a recovery, from reported events, including restart application, or a thread of the application, based on checkpointed data, restart target application as soon as it becomes idle, and suspend a thread when a thread starvation condition exists.