Magento

I hope someone has addressed this issue already. I’m looking to somehow check when a product is about to be deleted if it exists in any orders which are in a processed or new status and if so prevent the user from removing the product. The reason is because a merchant may delete a product from the system and have no way of knowing whether that product exists in some processed or new order. The issue that follows is that currently if they try to reorder the item from that order you get a nice ugly error message that the item cannot be found. Has anyone dealt with this or does someone know where to begin to address this?