[BRLTTY] BRLTTY dies after S/Vario power down

[Jason White]

This problem seems to happen more regularly with the slightly older
SuperVario/Brailliant display to which I have access at the university,
compared with mine at home.

I managed to trigger the problem while BRLTTY (a recent svn verison) was
running under gdb. This must have happened some time after the display powered
down due to the idle timeout.
"Program exited with code 0177" (presumably that's octal). Obviously I can't
perform a backtrace at this point. Is there any place in BRLTTY where it exits
with this exit status?

Debugging suggestions are welcome.