I'm afraid I'm out of my depth now so I'll stand back and let someone more experienced step in. However, I would say three things.
First, I would expect an empty catch to override the IDE and so remove the error.
Second, and most importantly, I still stand by my previous comment about ALL errors needing to be caught, notified and handled. I'm surprised that the IDE has a two pass system and allows first passes to go.
Thirdly, This seems to be an IDE thing. Would the published .exe (if it is different to the .exe generated when run in debug mode) behave the same?