I'm assuming that when you wrote "NEVER use "Catch ex As Exception". " ... the rest of that was supposed to read " with nothing in the catch block"... right? because a try catch with nothing in the catch block is the same as OERN... BUT....

catch ex as Exception IS perfectly valid... yes, you SHOULD trap for known more granular exceptions and work your way down to more generic exceptions... but there are cases, where you jsut need to know an exception happened, log it, and move on... even if you trap for 20 specific exceptions... it's that 21st one that will get you... having a generic handler like ex as exception is good, providing you're doing something useful with it... and you're at the bottom level of the stack... I think exception handlers should be at the smallest level possible and that application-level ones are a sign of "I'm too important to go track through all my code and write proper error handlers where they belong.

-tg