Regain access to seemingly frozen Live CD session

A few weeks back I started a machine up with a copy of Parted Magic, and loaded up some webpages in Firefox on it. Just last week, upon getting back to looking at the machine, I noticed that lxpanel had grown to a larger than normal memory size, and UI response was sluggish. At that time I set ¿stupidly? xset s on & xset s 1. Today I go to use the machine and find I cannot use the keyboard or mouse to make the display turn on for 1 second (enough time for me to launch terminal and xset s off (My basic attempt to create secure screen saver like functionality)). I am aware I can kill X, or launch oom_kill, but both of these options will/could loose my unsaved form data that I would prefer not to recreate, even if more time is involved with regaining access to the current session. Does anyone have any other solutions?