It would be useful if the Designer would auto-save your project every X minutes or so. With projects being file system based, I imagine in Windows it could be written to the user's %temp% directory and the Designer check for entries there on the next startup. This might also help eliminate the need for the "do you want to save this project to a file" dialog when the Designer loses contact to the gateway.

This idea brought to you by lost work due to a JVM crash.