Emacs: Saving and restoring original pane layout (e.g. when working with ediff)

Emacs: Saving and restoring original pane layout (e.g. when working with
ediff)

In a typical Emacs session I often have only one pane open, and I have it
divided into 4 windows forming a 2x2 grid with some specific buffers
(files) in each window.
Every time I use ediff-buffers to compare two buffers, Emacs takes my
existing pane, and re-splits it into two panes vertically (which I can
choose to hortizontal by subsequentially pressing -). However, when I quit
the ediff session, Emacs does not automatically restore the original
layout of windows in my pane.
With this my question is:
Is there any way to automatically restore my original layout?'
Even better, how can I have ediff-buffers open a new separate pane just
for the ediff session and close it automatically when I quit the ediff
session?