Added brute-force resets back to spec_helper to stabilize test suite.

Our test suite has become very unstable lately. It has always depended on pretty brute-force reset logic in the spec_helper. I shouldn't have taken this approach in the first place and we need to improve my buggy tests in the next release or two. The immediate  need is to stabilize our test suite. I created this PR to trigger Travis and see if it helps. If so I'll merge it and we can begin working on individual test sets.