This paper presents a lightweight CORBA fault-tolerance service called FTS. The service is based on standard portable features of CORBA, and in that respect is fully CORBA compliant, but does not follow the FT-CORBA specifications in areas where the authors felt the latter interfered with their other design goals. The service features a unique architecture, based on a new type of an object adaptor, called Group Object Adaptor (GOA). The service is portable, interoperable, and aims for simplicity and high-performance request processing. Moreover, the service supports network partitions, some aspects of non-deterministic processing, and mixing ORBs of different vendors in the same fault-tolerance infrastructure. The paper also presents an analysis of the differences between the service design and FT-CORBA, with the hope of stimulating a discussion about future improvements to the FT-CORBA standard.