There are 2 process that Anim Recovery runs through Maya Standalone sessions. Please read this article to understand about Standalone Sessions and how to fix problems with it.
Anchor Checkpoints
One of those processes saves the current scene "anchor checkpoints". That process launches the current Maya scene on a Standalone Maya session and save the current animation state, by saving animation curves and attribute values of pretty much everything in the scene. This is needed, so that a user can roll back to a state before any changes were made. As of version 1.3.0 this can be disabled at user level under Anim Recovery right click menu, or across the board by setting this variable on config.json - "disabledTools": ["animRecoverySaveAnchorCheckpoints"] - (Enterprise Edition only).
Checkpoints cleanup
This process will launch a blank Maya scene on a Standalone Maya session and do a clean up job by removing old checkpoints and merging checkpoints together, with the intention of saving disk space and speeding up the process of loading those checkpoints when needed. As of version 1.3.0 this can be disabled at user level under Anim Recovery right click menu, or across the board by setting this variable on config.json - "disabledTools": ["animRecoveryCleanupCheckpoints"] - (Enterprise Edition only).
So, what happens when the Standalone Maya session crashes?
In a nutshell, Anim Recovery won't work. In addition to that, if those sessions are freezing in the background, they could still be taking a lot of memory and could even freeze the whole system or make it very slow.