I've implemented an option that causes VIFF to throw an exception 
rather than keeep retrying to connect:

changeset:   1426:2324d01c74e2
user:        Thomas P Jakobsen <tpj@cs.au.dk>
date:        Wed Jan 20 08:54:41 2010 +0100
summary:     Added option to avoid retrying to connect if socket is 
already in use.

Indeed, I implemented this in order to be able to better run VIFF from 
scripts like automated benchmarks, so I think it resolves this issue.

Add an option which will make the players stop trying to reconnect
after a certain number of attempts.

This is will be important for Issue 40 so that we can run a set of
players from a script and exit with an error if the network is down or
some other problem prevents the players from connecting to each other.