In this paper, the L-2 anti-windup approach introduced in Teel and Kapoor (Proceedings of the Fourth ECC, Brussels, Belgium, July 1997) is generalized and applied to the problem of bumpless transfer in (saturated) multi-controller systems, and to the problem of designing highly reliable saturated control systems exploiting hardware redundancy. We first illustrate the L-2 anti-windup technique and apply it to a simple physical example and then demonstrate the performance of its extension to the above-mentioned problems using this example and an example taken from the literature.