How to abort a long-running regex replace

Edit: While I refer to RegEx in my background, I'm not looking for you to fix my RegExp (thanks for trying though) – rather I want to know "how do I abort a search/replace in NotePad++".

Environment

I'm using latest version of NPP (v.5.9.6.2) on Windows 7 64 bit

Background (aka "The Problem")

Occasionally I use NPP to manipulate bits of text and more often than not I use regular expressions during that process. While it is no criticism of the product (how can it be?), Notepad++ allows me to do stupid things that don't behave as I intended. Case in point, I had a long list of values which I wanted to enclose in quote marks. I entered an accidentally aggressive expression and it caused an infinite loop.

The reason for the loop is immaterial and is not the point of my question – I've made this mistake more than once – i know it doesn't work, but I forget and months later will do the same thing again.

The problem is that when NotePad++ goes into this infinite loop, trying to complete the imposisble, I am effectively locked out of all of my unsaved documents and forced to kill the NPP process.

Question

I can't find anything documented in Help or in the NPP "forum" but does anyone know of a way for me to abort a search and replace, such as in the aforementioned scenario, thereby allowing me to back out of my mistake and more importantly, save all of my other documents?