Aye - It always sucks to have to guard against outside problems.
You may have to do an end run around it if Nvidia doesnt want to fix the problem and find a way to force VO to exit. (even if it means leaving a small chunk of memory owed by Nvidia behind)... Of Course you could try detaching from the driver first before surrendering control back to the OS. Not really sure how practical that is under the current regime...

Personally I wouldn't try to spend time on a workaround for this - it's an issue caused by specific drivers on a specific platform and will likely be fixed by the people responsible, especially because other games have the same problem due to the bug.

Nvidia fixing thier driver is the ideal solution but finding a solution that would prevent the problem in VO is also a consideration. Other bugs are waiting....

finding a solution that works with vo

Errm no. It's not up-to the devs here to work on problems with drivers that they don't have access to source code for. AFAIK, VO doesn't touch kernel space, like the nvidia driver binary blob. Why should guild spend time on a problem that might be fixed by nVidia tomorrow? Also nVidia could fix this bug, and the fixes guild do might break the fixes nVidia roll out, involving more work?

You can fix it yourself, with a simple wrapper script that is actually posted earlier in this thread. Or phone nVidia and be told that they actually do not provide any support for the Linux driver.

Because it needs to be fixed for everybody yoda....

Well, I don't know about anyone else that was having this issue but it has stopped for me. I recently updated to the new driver just released but I noticed that it wasn't hanging anymore before I installed it. Now it exits properly but I get a different message:

RPC thread: Bad file descriptor