Android :: Activity Should Be Restarted After Activity Crashes?

we are developing an application where we are depending on a native, custom-written library which sometimes crashes. When the Activity crashes (it's the Activity's SurfaceView that crashes, either while resuming or pausing Activity) we would like to automatically restart the Activity that was just running, preferably without seeing the idle screen in between. What we find strange is that sometimes, our Activity is restarted by Android automatically after the crash, and sometimes not. How does Android decide this? Is it somehow dependant on exactly what the Activity was doing at the time of the crash and if that was considered important enough to restart? How can we force a restart to make sure the Activity doesn't quit after a crash? Running on device flashed with Android 1.5. The Activity is running as singleInstance. Doesn't seem to make much difference which mode it is though. Other methods we have tried are:

1) Since we can predict when crash is going to happen(but not stop it), use AlamrManager to start the Activity again via an Intent, 3 seconds later. Has the disadvantages that 1) need to be able to predict crash 2) if crash takes longer than 3 seconds (normally about 2s) it won't work 3) Idle screen is seen for about ~1 s, since some slack is needed.

2) Start a Service, then let the Service (which always seems to be restarted by Android after crashing) start the Activity in its onStart method. Has the disadvantage that Android doesn't restart the service until 5 seconds after the crash, so the idle screen is seen quite along time before Activity restarts. Is it possible to modify how long it takes before the Service is restarted by the Android system?