Always, really? Perhaps I'm lucky but this happens quite frequently with my system (dev workstation, so browser with lots of tabs, IDE, my own app/server stuff, other "power/mem-hungry" dev tools...), and I always manage to keep it sane/healthy:

- notice system starts swapping (if you do not monitor that, to me it sounds as careless as driving on the highway on 2nd gear and ignoring engine noise -- ideally the OS could proactively help here but unfortunately I don't know a good "automated" tool)

- find out which process/app uses the most memory (Linux can even tell you which ones use the most swap space [1])

- decide which one you want to (gently|forcefully)-(quit|restart|whatever). Exercise judgment.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/479953/how-to-find-out-wh...

> I cannot remember a single occasion, where my desktop recovered when it started swapping.

..which operating system is that?

Ubuntu

Sounds to me your swap is not swapon'd. I get the same behaviour when I'm not running swap and memory is depleted.