Hi Keith,

I (and many others) strongly discourage catching the general exception class at any level -- this anti-pattern actually makes debugging more difficult.  One exception to this rule (that some argue for) is a top-level exception handler that logs the relevant data and (in a web-application context) displays a message to an end-user.  Obviously DotNetNuke diverges from this standard throughout its code, but I would wager that many on the core team would agree that this is something that should be addressed at some point in the future (I, of course, could be mistaken on this point).  Google for lots more interesting discussion.

That said, if you insist on catching exceptions that the current method has no way of handling, please consider just re-throwing the exception after logging it.  Something along the lines of:

Try
     ...
Catch ex As System.IO.IOException
    LogException(ex)
    Throw
End Try

Note that I've selected a more-specific exception than the base System.Exception class above.  Hope this gets you started!

Brandon