I've had problems with fglrx where it crashes because you resize the window too quickly, and then it's done something really funky, so when you do CTRL+ALT+F_N it doesn't actually give you a shell.

I'd bet money OP didn't even try or doesnt know how to do that.

This is what I thought to.

I've never once had an application in Linux crash the whole OS - or at least not so long as I've had physical access to the machine (I've had rouge database requests brick a server before because it took down sshd - but that's a different story)

In fact on the laptop I'm on now, the parent link crashed Firefox. But it OOM'ed and got killed before I even noticed there was a problem (and that's on a beefy desktop environment with compositing enabled too)

You should tell your database to go easy on the rouge - a lady keeps it subtle.