I don't have a particular answer to this exact question, but when faced with similar situations in the past, most specifically waiting for a network resource to be up, I added a check that polls for an expected result (for example, a network share exists) and then continues.
So you might want to actually try to do something trivial that requires the application be available and functioning (get the version, get some data, etc), and only continue when you get a decent response. You would likely also want to add an overall timeout, as well -- in the event you can never connect due to some other problem.
