of of my "favorite" projects I worked on was when a developer would always do try { ScaryThing(); } catch { /* completely empty */ }, this was his exception handler for all situations.

I knew I hit one of his bugs when all of a sudden the app just stopped dead in its tracks, and boy were they fun to track down...

tortus, I've also run across "error handlers" written like that. And you're right, they can be incredibly frustrating. But that was nothing compared to what a friend of mine was working on. Code written by the same guy that wrote the frustrating code I ran into, a new project was throwing literally thousands of exceptions per minute to mask bugs. It was an incredibly idiotic design, to say the least. Surprisingly, the lead developer on the project saw absolutely nothing wrong with the project and how it handled exceptions. Truly a case where the people in charge were entirely too incompetent to perform their job, but had too much power to allow anything to change.

Empty catch clauses and using exceptions instead of normal error handling are mortal sins that require immidiate crucifiction when encountered. ;-)