I ran into a problem at a previous job with the catch-code in the "global" try block in an ASP.Net app, itself throwing an exception. IIS just dies with a 8-digit hex code that according to MSDN means pretty much whatever ("try some or all of these 15 different possible solutions").

It took a few days working the support, and I did get on a conference call with some brilliant people, and they figured it out quickly - using a (forget its name) debugger that talks directly to the CRL (which the one in Visual Studio apparently doesn't).

All this because (I think) something somewhere in that stack decided to "protect" me from the cause of the error.

This is generally my problem with Microsoft. No so much the arbitrary discussion of whether or not it sucks, but the difficulty of getting under its helmet, which tends to make problems much bigger than they ought to be.

And yes, I DO know it's incredibly bad design to put so much code in a global catch-block that it can fail.

Yeah, totally. This is why closed-source software isn't dead :-)