If tor dies while vidalia is waiting for port.conf, vidalia should notice better
- Vidalia launches Tor
- Waits to read port.conf to find out how to talk to Tor
- Tor dies (seg faults or something)
- After a short pause, Vidalia complains that it couldn't read port.conf.
There should be a step 3.5 where Vidalia realizes that the Tor process isn't around anymore, and that's probably why the port.conf file didn't show up. Then it can give the user a better hint about what went wrong.