A little bit risky, but maybe not too much so.  The idea is to improve the responsiveness and speed of GUI a bit.  For some reason the new 2.9.4.1 Snort binary takes a lot longer to start and stop than 2.9.0.5 did.  This is true even with no rules selected at all.  Spawning the restart task off to the background releases the GUI so the user can continue with other tasks.