I used to support a warehouse management system (RedPrairie) that our company had customized per business rules. At some point, a bug was introduced which locked up a very important table and brought multiple warehouses to a stand-still. The decision makers weren't interested in fixing the bug, so after months of waking up at 2am to kill these locks, my coworker and I wrote a script which monitored for locks on this table from SQL with a certain pattern and killed any lock that persisted for longer than N seconds, then sent an email to anyone and everyone. This really messed with the integrity of the data in the system, but the decision makers loved the decrease in downtime and it stayed in place for a year before the bug was finally fixed.
Wow that name brings back memories. Worked for a company years ago that moved to RedPrairie from an older system and was not happy about the "upgrade". This was around the same time they changed their interface for customer service to enter orders and customer information (to BlueMartini- same company that owns RP maybe?), which was also painful (old-IE-only, bug-ridden, etc)
