screen shapshot and resume across linux reboot?

[ping]

recently, most of the time because of an huge winxp vmware image (> 10G) 
startup/suspend process,
I need to power cycle my PC (disk LED is flashing all the time, cpu is 
low though, even switching to console trying to kill X I can't login, 
saying some buffer size exhaused to 0...).
anyway, after I restart up I always need to build up screen and every 
app that I was running inside again...
what is current best way/tool to resume from a "snapshot of screen" and 
continue with whatever left before linux reboot?
thanks!

regards
ping