Another possibility (Score 1)

Granted, this would be an excellent form of BSOD-prevention for Windows, but there may be more to it than that. A few of the more subtle points in the patent could also be used as a sort of virus defense. For instance, it mentions virtual hardware devices and suggests that the emulator would know some things about how hardware will behave when certain I/O instructions are executed. So, in addition to being able to prevent exceptions, it could also make sure a program doesn't do anything naughty to the hard drive. I don't think this is exactly what they had in mind, but it's something that occurred to me as I was reading the patent (and before my brain began to bleed from the redundancy).