When a program terminates - either by calling System.exit, terminating the last thread or by not catching an exception, the VM simply deletes its entire store. In case of abnormal termination this may seem a bit harsh, but considering that the store would be useless as it cannot be restarted and - without a tool like a store browser - cannot be analyzed for errors, it seems the right choice. As mentioned earlier, checkpoints of a store can and should be achieved by hotsyncing a store to a desktop system. This behavior could be changed when tools exist to do a post-mortem on programs that exit abnormally.