Steve and James both offer good advice -- and it seems like your approach is sound too. We typically do the same thing -- specific catches where possible and generic catches around the whole thing. The one thing that I would add is that in large environments where the applications group hands off support of the system to the operations or help desk team after implementation, sometimes it makes good sense to send the non-end-user messages to the Windows application log instead of to a tracefile or email. That way the support team can look at things centralized in the event viewer rather than having to learn another location to look for errors. It doesn't make sense in every situation, but it helps immensely in others.